How to Boost LinkedIn SSI Score in Just 15 Minutes a Day with Expandi

LinkedIn Social Selling Index, or SSI for short, is a unique LinkedIn metric that determines your profile’s rank. That means if your LinkedIn profile is optimized enough and your outreach campaigns are highly engaging, you should expect better results and a greater reach.

What is the Social Selling Index?

LinkedIn describes the index as a “first-of-its-kind measure of a company’s or individual’s adaptation of the 4 pillars of social selling on LinkedIn, based on a scale of 0 to 100.”

The maximum score for each pillar is 25 and LinkedIn says SSI is a helpful measure of a salesperson’s social selling skills and execution.

Now, the validity and usefulness of LinkedIn’s SSI continue to be a source of debate among marketers and salespeople.

You can use the index as a criteria for optimizing your LinkedIn profile and your marketing activities. If one of your SSI pillars is low, you’ll know what to focus on to boost your brand on LinkedIn.

We’ll cover all 4 pillars, their benefits, as well as how to boost your SSI below. 

But why does a SSI LinkedIn score matter?

• Social selling leaders create 45% more opportunities than peers with lower SSI.
• Social selling leaders are 51% more likely to reach their quota.
• 78% of social sellers outsell peers who don’t use social media.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

• LinkedIn SSI Breakdown: 4 Pillars and How to Boost Each
• How to Measure LinkedIn SSI and The Benefits of a High Score

Now, let’s break down LinkedIn SSI and see how you can boost each of its pillars by spending up to 15 minutes a day.

Oh but wait, did you know we’re constantly sharing the latest outreach hacks and successful campaigns – down to the exact templates and subject lines in our private Facebook group? Be sure to join the LinkedIn Outreach Family for all things email marketing and LinkedIn outreach as well!

LinkedIn SSI Breakdown: 4 Pillars and How to Boost LinkedIn Social Selling Index

According to LinkedIn, social selling has four key elements:

• Establishing your professional brand.
• Finding the right people.
• Engaging with insights.
• Building relationships.

“What is my LinkedIn SSI score,” you ask? We got you. 

Social Selling Index LinkedIn – how to check:

• Log in to your LinkedIn account
• Visit the Social Selling Index LinkedIn page to see your score
• The greater your score, the higher your chances of having a stronger LinkedIn presence and successful outreach

LinkedIn claims that as your SSI rises, so does your sales success.

The fastest way to boost your SSI is to get Sales Navigator, which according to LinkedIn, can boost your SSI by 20% in 6 months.

Now, let’s take a look at these 4 elements in detail and discover techniques you can use to boost them starting today.

1. Establishing your professional brand

Establishing your professional brand starts with optimizing your LinkedIn profile to attract your target market.

You’ll get top marks here if you have a profile picture, a banner image, tagline, custom summary, experience filled in, unique recommendations, and so on.

You’ll also need to post relevant content regularly and engage with your network’s content.

The goal here is to establish yourself as a thought leader in your niche. So, it’s worth going that extra mile to optimize your profile and get your name out there.

Check how to do that and other essential steps to prepare before launching a LinkedIn campaign.

You should:

• • Make sure all of your LinkedIn profile sections are filled in.

• • Make the most out of multimedia and add rich content on your profile such as videos and presentations.

• • Aim to increase your endorsements and if possible, recommendations.

• • Publish niche-specific long-form posts consistently to boost engagement and bring in the right traffic to your profile.

2. Finding the right people

Finding the right people is essential for your LinkedIn lead generation campaign results as well as boosting your SSI.

This boils down to having your target audience defined and successfully connecting and engaging with them (next step).

To find your audience, you can use:

• • Regular and advanced LinkedIn searches can help you narrow down search results and focus on the quality of prospects rather than the quantity.

• • LinkedIn groups as most industry folks are active on them.

• • LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find your leads through job change alerts, prospects similar to your existing customers, the “posted on LinkedIn” search filter, and more.

• • Growth-hacking and outreach automated campaigns.

Let’s focus on the last one for a bit.

This is what we’ve had the most success with when it comes to finding the right people for outreach campaigns.

Because once you have your target audience defined, you can set up an automated campaign using the world’s safest LinkedIn automation tool to reach out to them. This way, you won’t have to connect with your leads one-by-one and you won’t have to write a separate connection request every time.

If you know your audience well enough, you’ll also know what type of influencers they follow and engage with.

This was the idea behind our content retargeting growth-hack campaign. In it, we scraped the comments of a viral LinkedIn post and reached out to connect with them with the following template:

“Hi {first_name}, 

Saw you also liked the amazing LinkedIn Growth Hack post by Ugljesa Djuric from Lemtalk. I guess we have growth in common. 

Love it! 

Let’s connect.”

Simple campaign – strong results.

This way, you’ll be able to identify your prospects in less time using more efficient searches and research tools.

Check out this article on LinkedIn marketing influencers if you’re not sure where to start.

To recap:

• • Be proactive.

• • Find the right people.

• • Save the right leads.

• • Follow up.

• • Keep track of your relationships.

• • Use LinkedIn automation to your advantage when connecting with people.

3. Engaging with insights

Once you’ve built up your professional brand and you’re connecting with the right people, the next step is to discover and share conversation-worthy updates to create and grow relationships. 

This LinkedIn SSI pillar measures your engagement – in terms of shares, likes, and comments your posts are receiving.

Engaging with insights is a great way to organically attract industry professionals you’re looking to connect and work with.

To develop their network, nowadays, a lot of people have turned to “comment if you’d like to receive this offer” type of posts.

Like this one:

By offering some kind of value, you’ll be able to increase your reach and attract more people to engage with your content. Then, you can connect with them, and in turn, engage with their content with your insights.

Check out our omnichannel growth-hack with hyper-personalization for more info on this and the rest of the above campaign that got us a ~72% acceptance rate and 40%+ response rate.

Ensure you’re regularly monitoring the following points:

• • View the number of shares, post impressions, and comments your content receives to analyze how impactful how content strategy is.

• • Check message and reply rates on LinkedIn messages and InMails. A decent rate of about 25% shows you’re making meaningful conversations and responding on time.

• • See if you’re engaging in LinkedIn Groups. Staying active on them enhances authority.

See how often your profile appears in LinkedIn search results, as it’s a good indication of your content working and if your profile is optimized enough or not.

4. Building strong relationships

LinkedIn defines this SSI pillar as strengthening your network by finding and establishing trust with decision-makers and other thought leaders in your niche.

So, where do you find these decision-makers?

Well, for one, you can use the advanced LinkedIn search filter using boolean operators. 

Boolean operators are a type of advanced search filter that allows you to combine keywords with modifiers such as AND, NOT, OR to produce more specific LinkedIn search results:

• • AND – To find profiles that include all items in a list. E.g. “marketing” AND “CEO” for CEO marketers. 

• • NOT – To exclude a search term. E.g. “sales” NOT “manager”.

• • OR – To find results that include one or more items in a list. E.g. “marketing” OR “growth-hacking.”

The more specific your LinkedIn search filters and outreach campaigns are – the better the results.

To take this a step further, you can also incorporate LinkedIn automation here.

Which is exactly what we did in one of our brand reach and awareness growth-hack campaign. Here’s what we did:

1. 1. Used Expandi to reach out and warm up our leads on LinkedIn.
   2. Used Zapier as a middleman and connected Expandi with the tools below.
   3. Hunter to scrape the email lists of our leads.
   4. Facebook Ads to retarget our warmed leads using a custom audience.

What makes this growth-hack so great is that we’re connecting with people on LinkedIn AND building key relationships with authority leaders along the way.

We used a relevant and free PDF as a hook to connect with our leads and then created Facebook ads to retarget them and book a demo call.

As far as brand awareness and building relationships go – there’s no better way than to offer free value upfront and then get on a call with your prospect to strengthen your bond with them.

From there on, you can continue engaging with them to further grow your brand.

Measure LinkedIn SSI and The Benefits of a High Score

So, what does this all mean exactly and what IS a good LinkedIn SSI score?

While it may be hard to gauge the practical benefits of SSI, we just have to take LinkedIn’s word for it when they say the higher your score is, the more successful you are at reaching their sales goals.

It’s important to note that your SSI is not a guarantee of increased sales success.

For that, you’d have to track your marketing and sales qualified leads, your ROI and so on.

Your SSI score, meanwhile, makes a strong connection between your specific and targeted networking activities and an increase in sales opportunities and potential prospects.

If you’re actively doing outreach and booking demos through LinkedIn, that means you’re also satisfying LinkedIn’s definitions of the 4 pillars mentioned above.

So, you should be using LinkedIn’s SSI rating as a benchmark for your profile’s health.

It’s hard to say what is a good LinkedIn SSI score as it depends on your industry.

This is why the “people in your industry/network” sections are so useful.

The higher your SSI – the better.

And you should be constantly striving to increase it. 

If your “finding the right people” element of your SSI is lower than the other pillars, you might want to focus on increasing your network connections. 

As you focus on more LinkedIn outreach and campaigns, your SSI score will increase accordingly. Along the way, make sure you’re utilizing relevant growth-hacks and tools mentioned in this guide.

Once you do that, you should see an increase in your SSI as well as leads generation.

Conclusion

So, to recap, SSI stands for Social Selling Index and it’s a measure LinkedIn uses to track your sales success and your profile’s overall health.

A quick checklist on how to increase your SSI on LinkedIn:

• • Have a strong and professional brand by keeping your LinkedIn profile up-to-date, adding multimedia, such as rich images to your profile, using a high-quality profile and cover picture, and posting niche-specific content for your followers.

• • Leverage your LinkedIn account to find the right people in your target audience. Refine your search using premium tools like the LinkedIn Sales Navigator and boost outreach with automation tools like Expandi.

• • Engage with others’ content by adding your unique insights and takes. Be active on LinkedIn Groups. 

• • Strengthen your network by improving the quality of your connections. They must be from your target industry and niche.

As long as you’re doing active LinkedIn outreach and lead generation, you should expect your LinkedIn SSI to rise accordingly.

And if you want to boost your SSI more efficiently, you can turn to tools like Sales Navigator and safe LinkedIn automation tools.

By automating certain LinkedIn outreach tasks (sending connection requests, follow-up messages, engaging with prospects, etc.), you’ll be increasing your SSI much faster while also generating leads on autopilot.

And the best part is all this happens in the background while you’re working on other tasks.

So, if that sounds like something you’d like to utilize starting today, here’s what you can do:

Sign up for a free 7-day Expandi trial to start using the growth hacks mentioned above the same day.

P.S.: We’re constantly sharing the latest outreach templates and subject lines you can use in your marketing campaigns in our private Facebook group. Be sure to join the LinkedIn Outreach Family today!

Looking for other techniques and LinkedIn campaigns to boost your SSI?

Also read:

• • 5+ LinkedIn Lead Generation Strategies That Brought Us 500+ Leads

• • 15+ LinkedIn Cold Message Examples That Get ~49+% Reply Rate

• • LinkedIn Sales Navigator Growth Hack for Better Prospecting: 5 Modern Search Tactics