Did you know there is something called Social Selling Index on LinkedIn? I didn’t until recently. It “measures how effective you are at establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships” according to the professional network itself.
Why is it important? Or better yet, is it important?
Whether you are on LinkedIn as an individual or a company, it could help you to generate more leads that will later transform into better results. This applies whether you are selling something or establishing yourself, looking for a job or looking to expand your business opportunities. Also, your profile will appear a lot more if you have a higher score.
For me, it translates into positioning yourself, your product or service on the platform and getting the maximum benefit possible from it.
How does it work?
To give you a score, LinkedIn pulls data from your profile on a daily basis, and builds it based mainly on your:
- Established professional brand
- Right connections
- Quality of relationships
- Value brought to your community
There are some ways to improve these elements, as explained by LinkedIn itself. But there are some things I’ve learned after interacting with the platform quite often for a couple of months. There are a few simple things you can do to get value out of LinkedIn and give something back to your network as well. And they also align with the things that LinkedIn values for its index.
- Keep your profile complete, up to date and reflecting what you want to transmit to others.
- Connect with others, people you admire and people you have things in common with. Maybe also with people that are the complete opposite to you. There is something we can learn from everybody.
- Interact constantly with people. Give your opinion, add value, congratulate when there is good news, and share an interesting point of view. Also, something I’m not doing often enough, but I should, introduce yourself when you ask someone to connect with you.
- This one is a bit harder for me, but it’s important as well: Create content. As the great Gihan Hyde said to me recently, it’s important that people get to know who you are as a professional.
Keep in mind that your score is not set in stone and will vary from day to day and week to week. So, if it’s important to you, give it some attention.
How do I know if my score is good or bad?
Well, I guess it depends on what you want. One way is to make a comparison with your peers. LinkedIn compares your score to people in your industry and your network.
I’ve included my SSI here as an example, from 05 May 2019. It’s not bad, but I sure can improve it.
Hopefully, you’ll find this useful and you can start building your SSI, if you decide to do it.
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