LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI): Everything You Need to Know in 2024

Olivia Milton 04 Jul 2024

All established companies worldwide focus on building their online presence, prioritizing social media channels because that’s where most of the action occurs.

There’s simply no better place to grow your brand awareness and credibility while also bridging the gap between your customers and your product or service, which is why social selling has boomed over the last few years.

While there are several effective channels, according to numerous social selling stats, LinkedIn remains by far the most popular one among both businesses and buyers:

Though company profiles can and should be optimized and consistently engaging, content posted by employees on their personal accounts receives 8x more engagement!

But how can you track, evaluate, and refine your social selling performance on LinkedIn?

Introducing the Social Selling Index (SSI)—a score provided by LinkedIn that measures the effectiveness of your profile’s social selling efforts.

Now, let’s find out how it works, why it’s important, and how to improve your SSI.

What is the LinkedIn social selling index (SSI)?

The social selling index (SSI) is a score provided by LinkedIn (out of 100) by analyzing your social selling performance.

The formula of the SSI is based on your effectiveness of LinkedIn’s 4 key activities:

establishing your professional brand
finding the right people
engaging with valuable insights
building relationships

(more details on each of them in a bit…)

Why does your LinkedIn SSI matter?

Though not talked about enough, social selling is one of the top underrated SaaS growth strategies that has the potential to improve your business’s long-term success.

Rather than providing vague or ambiguous benefits of building the SSI for B2B professionals, here is some concrete data on the right from the source:

45% increase in business opportunities for those with higher SSI scores;
51% more likelihood to reach their business quotas;
78% of social sellers outperform their peers who don’t leverage social media.

Source: LinkedIn

On top of that, building your SSI score will also supercharge your personal brand, which has become increasingly important for sales professionals to effectively connect with potential buyers and partners.

A strong LinkedIn SSI score gives a solid boost to your professionalism and expertise in your field, not only enticing high-profile business leaders to engage in business with you but also significantly growing your company brand reputation.

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What are 4 pillars of the social selling index (SSI) LinkedIn score?

Speaking social selling on LinkedIn, it is undoubtedly an effective way for sales and other B2B professionals to connect with a wider audience, grow their personal and company’s brand, and create a powerful sales pipeline.

However, considering the SSI score is based on a concrete formula, it’s important to follow the rules of the game to see the best results from your social selling efforts, and those rules are the 4 key components mentioned above.

Establish your professional brand

Your LinkedIn profile is your direct representation in the digital world, which is why it’s essential to establish a solid professional brand to make a meaningful first impression and stand out from the crowd.

Once you get your professional brand to a certain level, you will be established as a thought leader in your industry, bringing in sales and business opportunities like a magnet. Until then, it’s important to cover the basics:

Optimize your profile → ensure your LinkedIn profile is professional, detailed, and optimized with your personal and/or company brand.

As you can see, a professional headshot, an appealing cover photo, a short and relevant intro sentence, and a neat link to his newsletter—everything needed to make a highly-optimized LinkedIn profile.

Showcase your expertise → don’t shy away from sharing your expert knowledge and valuable industry resources with your audience.

Try to keep your posts as visual as possible for better engagement (pictures, GIFs, videos, infographics, etc.), ideally — while maintaining a consistent visual style to all your posts.

On the topic of showcasing your expertise, make sure to fill up your profile with endorsements and recommendations from your colleagues and clients to radiate more credibility to your audience.

Find the right people

When it comes to your LinkedIn SSI score, quality trumps quantity in virtually every aspect.

Instead of connecting with as many LinkedIn professionals as humanly possible, B2B professionals should focus on Identifying and connecting with the right people, in other words—those who are relevant to their industry, profession, and clientele.

Besides, it would also ensure your social selling efforts are invested in the right direction, helping you build a solid audience in the long run.

Luckily, LinkedIn provides advanced search filters for all users to help narrow down their target audience based on criteria such as industry, job title, location, and more. Those willing to invest some money in their social selling can take it a step further with LinkedIn Sales Navigator which provides even more detailed and tailored search capabilities.

Another neat trick is to strategically leverage mutual connections, in other words, expanding your network by connecting with relevant second-degree prospects/clients/peers from your already existing connections.

The logic is that if you’ve connected with an established thought leader in your industry, chances are they have similar professionals in their network that you could connect with.

Engage with insights

Simply connecting with relevant people on LinkedIn isn’t enough to build up your professional brand and SSI score, though, it’s definitely a good start.

Simultaneously, social selling requires consistent and engaging posts to showcase your expertise, grow your credibility, and entice other professionals to connect with you.

Whether it’s industry news and insights, upcoming industry trends, external resources, or just your personal thoughts on a relevant matter — share it with the world so other like-minded peers can connect with you.

At the same time, don’t forget that it’s a two-way street! You also have to engage with other people’s posts to build up your SSI.

Comment on relevant posts by your connections, join conversations around your area of expertise (or interest) and participate in relevant industry-related groups, all of which will also help expand your reach and influence.

A quick word of advice — always be yourself when engaging with others on LinkedIn. Authenticity goes a long way in today’s world and others will appreciate it, and so will the LinkedIn SSI score.

Build relationships

Building and nurturing relationships is key to long-term success in social selling. The way our brains work in sales and business as a whole can be simplified to this formula — strong relationships lead to trust and, ultimately, more sales opportunities.

While the ‘golden’ advice in building meaningful relationships on LinkedIn is simply connecting with relevant people, sparking genuine conversations, and being your true (professional) self, here are a few more worthy mentions:

Eliminate any form of generic, automated messaging; Instead, always make sure all your messages are highly personalized, especially when sending that first connection request.
Pulling from the previous point, stay actively engaged with your network to keep the connection growing, offering value where appropriate in the form of insights, expertise, or help (without expecting anything in return), and celebrating their professional milestones.
Finally, a good way to build a new relationship from scratch is to connect with people who you already have similar connections with, whose company you’ve collaborated with in the past, or any other ‘mutual’ point you can find to help break the ice. This way, they will be much more likely to accept your request and engage in a conversation.

Social selling index LinkedIn: How to check your score?

Now that you’ve understood how to ensure your social selling efforts are growing your SSI, it’s crucial to consistently keep an eye on your score to track how well it’s performing.

Thankfully, checking your LinkedIn SSI score is as easy as it gets — simply go to the main LinkedIn SSI score URL, and click on ‘Get your score’ at the header.

Then, you will be automatically redirected to your personalized SSI dashboard that will provide you with:

your current SSI score (out of 100)
your industry SSI rank percentile
your network SSI rank percentile
a performance analysis of each of the 4 components of your SSI score
the average SSI score of people in your industry and your network, and it will look something like this:

Social selling index score Linkedin

This dashboard allows you to see where you’re excelling and where you’re lacking in your social sales efforts, empowering B2B professionals to place more emphasis on the latter to grow their SSI score and enjoy the benefits that come along with it.

What is a good social selling index Linkedin score?

Wondering if your SSI is any good? Here’s a quick way to tell: a good SSI score is usually above 70 out of 100. This means you’re using LinkedIn well to build your brand, find the right connections, engage with content, and grow your network.

Here’s how to break it down:

Your SSI	What it means
100	You’re a LinkedIn superstar, knowing everything there is!
90-99	You’re crushing it on LinkedIn – awesome job!
80-89	You’ve got a solid network and strong connections.
70-79	You’re doing great and using LinkedIn as a powerful marketing tool.
60-69	You’re pretty good at LinkedIn!
50-59	You share valuable content and engage often.
40-49	Your profile’s all set, and you know the LinkedIn basics.
0-39	You might need to step up your LinkedIn game.

In general, an SSI score above 70 means you’re doing great on LinkedIn. You’re actively building your brand, engaging with content, and connecting with the right people. If your score is lower, don’t worry—there’s always room to improve by being more active and strategic in your LinkedIn activities. Keep at it and watch your score climb!

What tools can boost your LinkedIn SSI?

As with virtually every other aspect of modern business, there are certain tools to help you in your mission of improving your LinkedIn SSI score (surprise, surprise).

For starters, LinkedIn themselves provide users with a few tools and resources dedicated to growing their social selling presence, and hence — your SSI score:

Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator offers an abundance of useful features for sales and other B2B professionals, from helping you prioritize the most relevant accounts to providing actionable intent signals such as prospect job changes.

Simply put, Sales Navigator is an excellent tool to help users find the right people and build relationships with them—2 of the 4 pillars of your SSI score.

LinkedIn Learning

It offers over a hundred of various learning courses, some of which cover everything to do with social selling from A-Z. Though very few of them are free, users do get 1 month of free access, and even then—these courses may be very well worth their money.

If that’s not enough, there are numerous external tools that can assist in your social selling efforts. While most of these tools aren’t ‘dedicated’ social selling index (SSI) LinkedIn tools, they do provide various features that can simplify, automate, and improve your social selling game.

Reply.io

Cnnecting with the right people and engaging in meaningful conversations is the foundation of a solid LinkedIn SSI score, and while it can be done manually, B2B professionals can also automate this process with sales automation platforms.

With its multichannel engagement sequences, Reply.io users can create and schedule their LinkedIn touchpoints (such as connection requests) and messages in cohesion with emails and follow-ups to increase their chances of making a connection.

On top of that, Reply.io has a native AI SDR that will personalize each and every LinkedIn interaction with relevant information about your prospect or their company.

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Hootsuite

Considering how important it is to maintain your LinkedIn presence with regular and engaging posts, insights, and conversations—social media management tools like Hootsuite streamline and automate this process.

Hootsuite is your social media management sidekick. It lets you schedule posts, track performance, and manage all your social media accounts in one place. Whether you’re planning your content calendar, engaging with your audience, or analyzing your social media performance, Hootsuite makes it easy.

Source: Hootsuite blog

Plus, with its powerful analytics, you can see what’s working and tweak your strategy for better results. It’s the go-to tool for anyone looking to up their social media game!

Kleo

Kleo is your go-to tool for getting insights on LinkedIn creators. It lets you dive into any creator’s content, checking out their top posts and engagement stats.

You can see when they post, how their content performs, and use filters to sort through their posts by format, date, and popularity.

Plus, you can preview your own posts before going live and style them with bold text, italics, and lists to make them stand out. Kleo helps you understand what works on LinkedIn and polish your own content to boost your presence.

Crystal

Crystal is an AI tool that helps you get to know your LinkedIn connections better.

By analyzing their online presence, it gives you tips on how to communicate with them effectively. Whether you’re sending an email, preparing for a meeting, or crafting a sales pitch, Crystal provides personalized advice to make your interactions more genuine and impactful.

This makes your outreach more effective, helping you build better relationships and boosting your LinkedIn social selling index.

Grow your LinkedIn SSI — elevate your sales game

To recap, social selling on LinkedIn is one of the most effective ways to supplement your existing sales strategy, while also boosting your personal and company’s brand, and the SSI score is the best and only way to measure your success.

So make sure to implement the tips provided, regularly check your SSI score, and gear up with a tool or two (don’t forget Reply) to make sure your social selling efforts pay off in the long run.

While it may be a lengthy journey, once you get your SSI score to the 90th percentile—you will be a recognized thought leader in your industry, and the sales and business opportunities will follow. Good luck!