LinkedIn lays a red carpet for your team to dazzle prospective buyers.
When you master the secret to being truly irresistible on LinkedIn – we’re talking about attracting powerful eyes, then converting them – you’ll frankly have an unfair advantage over your competition when it comes to buying time: and that’s how you win new clients with social selling.
Curious?
In this article we’ll explain how you can leverage LinkedIn's Social Selling Index to improve your social selling and make more sales. Spoiler alert: it all starts with your profile.
What do I need to know about social selling on LinkedIn?
Take a look at the people following you on LinkedIn. That’s an impressively long list of prospects, right?
If you’ve never talked to them – good. We’re about to show you exactly how, and it’ll only truly work if you approach prospects in the right way.
And no, we’re not talking about organic or paid social media marketing. This is all about building relationships and a strong presence within your industry on LinkedIn with one goal: making that sale.
Daunted? Don’t be.
What is LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index?
LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI) is a social selling measurement tool that LinkedIn created to determine how valuable your social selling efforts really are.
Using LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index is a great way to benchmark how you’re currently doing and improve your social selling performance.
Here are the four aspects that LinkedIn uses to determine your SSI:
- Creating a strong brand with an optimized profile
- Finding the right prospects for success
- Sharing relevant and valuable content
- Building and strengthening meaningful connections
Each element is worth 25 points: the closer you are to 100, the better off you are.
Why do you want a high Social Selling Index?
Having a high SSI can result in a wider reach in content, more people following you and more connection requests.
In fact, LinkedIn claims that social selling leaders create 45% more opportunities than peers with lower SSI.
How to find your Social Selling Index score?
You can instantly see how you stack up against the competition with this free tool to help you understand your Social Selling Index score.
Social selling not working? 5 ways you can improve your Social Selling Index on LinkedIn today
A network of powerful personal brands on LinkedIn is what the algorithm loves: having a strong profile and an active presence is essentially how LinkedIn works out if you’re a savvy, strong social seller.
If you’re not getting the reach you want, there’s a hard truth you might need to swallow: people don’t care about what you’re putting out there. Here is how you can create better value and send your SSI score higher.
1. Complete your LinkedIn profile
This is all about getting people to trust and remember you. Get the basic hygiene of brand building right: strong headshots, glowing recommendations and biographies that grow trust. Then, make sure your staff have cohesive branding and some great talking points that fit with your corporate messaging.
2. Grow relevant connections
If you're connecting with the right people, you're on the right track. Although quantity is important on LinkedIn, so is quality.
Rather than reaching out to everyone, take some extra time to find the right people. Consider using advanced searches on LinkedIn or finding related connections under your network.
Better yet, use LinkedIn Sales Navigator. LinkedIn suggests that Sales Navigator can boost your SSI by 20% in the span of 6 months.
This is a paid service offered by LinkedIn that allows you to Identify which companies are most related to you and your company, search for accounts based on elements that are important to you and monitor growth trends.
3. Post quality content
Posting quality content means that you will expand your reach. The wider your reach, the more likely you are to attract new prospects and customers.
Are you building content based on proven, established formats that perform well, or are you (be honest!) wasting time on overproduced assets and generic tips that miss the mark?
You’ve heard the phrase content is king: here’s how to earn your crown. When you use video, you see stronger results (videos are more eye-catching and algorithms love them). Here’s how to build irresistible video content in seconds by dragging and dropping your message into Storykit.
4. Have regular interactions with your network
Personalized messages and conversations are the foundation of social selling. The more one-on-one interactions you have, the greater your chances of success.
Of course, don’t just try to randomly connect with everyone. If you’ve ever opened LinkedIn and had a spam message or connection request before, you’ll know why it’s so important to get your message right the first time.
When you engage with other people’s content and respond to everyone who comments on your post, when you’re ready to connect, you will have a foundation.
5. Get your whole team involved
Grow your confidence and show LinkedIn that you are sharing valuable content by getting your whole team involved and creating a network where you share and like each other’s posts. This will give you a great boost, especially when you are just getting started.
TIP TO GROW FURTHER: Why not host a monthly check-in and competition to see which of your team members can climb their Social Selling Index score the highest?
Conclusion
When you understand your Social Selling Index score, you can hone your LinkedIn content, master your messaging and stand out as a thought leader in your industry.
Follow this guide to start your social selling strategy and you could be impressing your prospects on LinkedIn as soon as tomorrow. Good luck!
