What is an SSI score and does it matter?
Some people I know seem to use this score to monitor their effectiveness which it does is a sales environment as it is Social Selling Index. Not everyone is selling on Linkedin and your score can be affected by having Sales Navigator. Trouble is most people I meet can’t justify the £69 a month so it is a little biased. You pay LinkedIn money and then use this, and you will get a better SSI score. My score below is without Navigator and in fact since the end of November and I was not on premium until this week
So, what does your score actually mean? Here is a guide
Establish your professional brand
Having a complete profile certainly helps here. You need to fill in all the sections that LinkedIn has as standard and any pertinent ones. Then you need to get active doing posts and articles and interacting with others. Getting Recommendations regularly is also important
Find the right people
Grow your network by adding relevant people on a regular basis. You should also look in groups and interact with them. Definitely look regularly at who has viewed your profile and then chose 2nd line connections, look at their profile and send a personalised connection request when you find people you want to engage with
Engage with insights
Insights are part of the paid version, so this score is not that important to the standard version users and definitely is not a good reason to upgrade. What you can do is make a concerted effort to engage with the content of your connection
Build relationships
One of the most important in my eyes is building relationships. LinkedIn is used by many buyers to make decisions and it is even better if you can get referred or introduced. This is one good reason to build a strong network and the need for KPI’s (Key Persons of Influence-Daniel Priestley). By having KPI’s in your network and building a strong relationship with them they will happily introduce or refer you. Another way is getting decision-makers in your network and grow a relationship with them. Many people try the short game and connect and try to sell before building a relationship, and this is a tactic which has a low success rate. Build a strong network and nurture those relationships, size of the network is less important than strength
Ideally, you want to position yourself on the platform by being seen as an expert in your field, but not only that but one who regularly shares their knowledge with your connections and also interacting with them be it one of their posts, Articles or documents or a discussion in a group. It is all about engagement and activity, if you are not consistent with this you will see your SSI score drop.
Personally, I would not get to hung up on your score, more important is to grow that strong Network and to interact with it regularly, after all, it is about the people and people enjoy genuine interactions.
My call to action would be to grow your connections with ones you want to engage with don’t just collect them
