“Social Selling” is the newest trending method of selling with the focus of using social media to identify and target prospects.
LinkedIn created a Social Selling Index (SSI) comprised of four key components: establish your professional brand, find the right people, engage with insights, and build relationships. For a break down of the four components, check out our blog post, Your LinkedIn Profile Looks Good — Now What?
The SSI is a great indicator of success, as you are able to see which areas you excel in and which areas you could improve in terms of Social Selling. If you are engaging with your network through sharing updates and commenting on connections’ updates, but your profile or brand is not strong, you will be able to see that within your score.
We recommend checking your SSI score monthly, or at least once a quarter. When beginning new initiatives on LinkedIn, we suggest taking a screenshot or jotting down your overall score as well as your scores for the individual components. With a starting score to refer back to, you can easily track your progress.
Let’s take a look at your score. If you don’t have Sales Navigator, no problem. The Social Selling Index is available for anyone with a LinkedIn account. Just go here and click “Get Your Score Free.”
If you have Sales Navigator, log into your LinkedIn account, hover over your photo in the right hand corner and click “Go to Sales Navigator.”
On the right you can see your overall score, if there has been a weekly increase or decrease, and how many people have viewed your profile recently. In this case, knowing which area(s) the 6% increase occurred in is very beneficial because it shows me what is working.
Click on your score to see the full breakdown.
Here you can see each individual component of your score. Again, we highly recommend taking a screen shot or writing down these scores so you can measure the success of your LinkedIn initiatives and see the areas that still need more effort.
Good luck as you come up with your Social Selling plan and get to work on tracking your success!
