Over the last 12 months or so, a number of my wealth management clients have started to use LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index as a basic KPI to measure the engagement levels of their relationship managers on LinkedIn. The SSI (or ‘Score’) measures your LinkedIn activities on a scale of 0-100 and breaks that score down into 4 pillars (see below). This Score clearly doesn’t relate to number of new clients or new assets under management, but it does offer a simple way to assess whether you are undertaking the ‘right’ kind of activity on LinkedIn.
One of the questions I’m often asked during my workshops is what activity feeds into the Score, so I have provided a (non-exhaustive) list below of some important areas to focus on. Firstly, find you score here – https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/social-selling/the-social-selling-index-ssi
Pillar 1 – Establish your Professional Brand
- Fully complete your profile i.e. background image, headshot, headline, About, Skills, Experience, Education, and add items to the Featured section
- Increase relevant endorsements of your Skills
- Consider writing long-form articles and share high quality, relevant and helpful content
Pillar 2 – Find the Right People
- Run advanced people & account searches using either the free search filters or Sales Navigator and save those searches
- View people’s profiles and see who has viewed your profile
- Under this pillar, LinkedIn also monitors the number of active days you are on LinkedIn
Pillar 3 – Engage with Insights
- Follow influencers, companies & hashtags
- Join groups
- Engage in other people’s posts (a comment is better than a like)
- Respond to people’s engagement on your posts
- LinkedIn also looks at your outbound connection request and InMail response rates
Pillar 4 – Build Relationships
- LinkedIn looks at your total number of connections as well as the proportion of these that are senior (VP+), and how many internal (co-worker) connections you have
- There is also strong evidence that if you pay for and use Sales Navigator, your score can increase by up to 20%
As you can see, there are a multitude of factors that feed into the score. As a broad benchmark, the average score is 45-55, mine is 76, and I rarely see anything above 80.
If you would like to find out more about using LinkedIn as a marketing, business development and lead generation tool, please drop me a message on LinkedIn.
