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Social Selling on LinkedIn

08 February 2024

Social media has allowed businesses to create relationships with people all over the world. Nurturing your relationships with your followers through social media is very important to building a successful presence. Brand loyalty is very important when you as a business are selling a product or service.

Social selling is a method where businesses connect and foster relationships with potential customers or clients through the use of social networks. Through social selling, businesses can boost their level of credibility, create new and foster current relationships, and reach their high sales goals.

It is definitely out with the old and in with the new when it comes to selling. Old techniques such as cold calling are much less effective than creating authentic relationships online. Although social media is known for fast growth in terms of new followers and connections, when it comes to social selling, it is much more important to nurture and strengthen your current relationships.

When working on your relationships, it is important to keep in mind the sales funnel. Meaning knowing how to speak to each stage of connections. For example, for your new followers, it is important to educate them about your product and service, for recurring customers it is important to engage with them frequently so that your brand or business remains top of mind.

The social selling index or SSI is the metric social selling experts use to measure their success. This metric was first introduced by LinkedIn back in 2014. This metric measures the overall success of a business’s LinkedIn page. Some things that are measured would be:

📈 If your business page is well-managed and active

📈 If you are connecting with the correct audience

📈 If you are sharing up-to-date insights regarding your business and your industry

📈 If you are engaging and starting conversations with your audience

SSI Definition
LinkedIn SSI is a formula created to measure the performance of social selling strategies on a scale of 0 to 100.

If you would like to know your social selling score, here is how to do it:

Log into your LinkedIn Sales Navigator account.
Navigate to your social selling dashboard and click on ‘get your score‘

Check your score

At the beginning of social selling, it is important to look at your score as a starting point and tweak your strategy from here to improve the score. The score has 4 components:

Your Social Selling Index (SSI) measures how effective you are at establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships. This information is updated every day.

➡️ Find your LinkedIn SSI score here ⬅️

First, you can check the score of each of the 4 key elements mentioned before. This score ranks from 0 to 25 for each of them so, if you add up all these elements, the result will be a maximum of 100.

You will discover how well you are performing in each of these factors and know what you need to improve to increase your SSI.

Then, on the second part of the page, you can check the evolution of your LinkedIn index over time.

Besides, LinkedIn also offers this index in contrast with other professionals in your industry and in your network so you know where you stand.

What is a Good SSI Score?

The score goes all the way up to 100 so obviously the closer to 100 the better. However according to LinkedIn, 75 or higher is a great SSI score. At that level, you will be considered a thought leader of your specific industry on LinkedIn.

Through social selling on LinkedIn, you can build credible and authentic relationships to turn prospects into buyers. Big businesses that have been using social selling have crushed their sales goals.

In fact, according to LinkedIn “Social selling leaders create 45% more opportunities than peers with lower SSI, Social selling leaders are 51% more likely to reach quota, and 78% of social sellers outsell peers who don’t use social media.”

The numbers speak for themselves!

If you want to increase your SSI and become a thought leader on LinkedIn, here are a few best practices to keep in mind.

Establish a professional brand

Not only should you be professional on the app, but you must also create professional content that your target audience would find value in.

One easy way to do this is to participate in conversations about insights or events having to do with your industry. Sharing original content as well as resharing relevant content by other creators as well. By establishing a professional brand, you are providing your audience with something valuable so that when they follow you or purchase your product they feel connected to you on a deeper level.

Connect with the right people

Quality over quantity is effective when we are talking about social selling on LinkedIn. The end goal is to turn connections into sales, so be sure that you are connecting with and nurturing relationships with people who find your brand interesting, relevant, and valuable to them personally.

Remain true to your brand

By being your real authentic self you will connect with authentic people. Prioritize the connections you have with your audience first and sell them something second.

With authentic and loyal connections, the sales will come next!

Stay up to date with your industry

By being informed and up to date with insights going around you in your industry boosts your credibility and shows your audience you are trustworthy and knowledgeable. Subscribing to newsletters, listening to podcasts, reading news articles, and chatting with your coworkers are great places to gather resources and industry updates.

To improve your social selling skills, using a third-party platform like Metricool you can save time and stay organized. Below we will highlight some key features that can help!

Metricool Inbox

As we have already said 100 times in this article, engaging with your audience is the heart of social selling so responding to DMs and comments promptly is important.

With Metricools inbox, we organize all of your direct messages and comments in one place. They are separated by read and unread so you can be sure you are getting back to every one of your followers.

Metricool Inbox

Metricool LinkedIn Analytics

Thanks to LinkedIn analytics on Metricool, you can see how you can improve your profile and content, to best reflect your personal brand, or company page.

LinkedIn Analytics

Metricool Reports

Creating reports on Metricool is very easy and beneficial. This way you can take your analytics and refer back to them when it comes to tweaking your social strategy on LinkedIn.