New Tool to Grow Your LinkedIn Social Savvy Rating
According to LinkedIn, the “Social Selling Index (SSI) is a measure that ranks a company or individual’s utilization of a LinkedIn Profile as a social selling tool.” I prefer to define it as how socially savvy you are you in terms of building LinkedIn relationships, consistency of communication and engagement.
LinkedIn’s new free tool to discover your social savvy rating can be a great discovery. If you are not familiar with social selling as a term, it is “the process of using your professional brand to fill your pipeline with the right people, insights and relationships” as defined by Koka Sexton the social selling manager at LinkedIn.
LinkedIn’s new Free Tool to Discover your Social Savvy Rating
How we do business has changed for business buyers and consumer alike. Buyers have already made a decision before you reach them – so your job is to become the person they want to do business with. LinkedIn is the perfect platform to begin to connect with and develop relationships.
To learn more about the social selling process check out my article LinkedIn: Social Selling – Create better relationships, drive better results!
Let me get back to LinkedIn’s new free tool to discover your social savvy rating. The tool which was released in 2014, and was available only to companies with 100+ employees, 10 sales reps and those who had the Sales Navigator account. Recently, it became available to all English-speaking members, even if you have a basic (free) account. Technology is People. Whether you want to build your professional team or referral network on LinkedIn, pitching potential partners or mining LinkedIn sources for lead generation, at the end of every decision is a person, so you social relationships matter a lot. Fortunately for founders, we’re living in an ecosystem where accessibility is increasing. Sure it still takes time to build trust, but if you think back to the limitations of 5, 10 or 20 years ago, it’s clear
The SSI shows data on four vital dimensions of your social influence and engagement, known as the four pillars of social selling:
Social Selling Index measures your performance against these four essential elements described below.
Establishing your professional brand on LinkedIn
* The completeness of your LinkedIn profile, including the endorsements you’ve received
* Long form posts you’ve published and the number of followers resulting from your long-form posts
* Schedule moments for building out your relationships in areas that you haven’t tired before
* Think deeper into linking to individuals you know for your outer circle of connections. Consider that as an extension of your inner circle of people.
* Root yourself as a base of niche business expertise and connections that others on LinkedIn will want to transact through
* Ask others for an introduction on LinkedIn
Finding the right people – based on what kind of searches you perform.
* Connections
* The acceptance rate of your connection requests
LinkedIn Insights Can Build Social Savvy Ratings
Discover and share conversation in other words, what you put out and how others engage with your content.
* Shares, likes, comments, and re-shares
* Messages sent and the response rate
* Groups joined and your engagement within Groups
Build Social Relationships on LinkedIn
How you use LinkedIn to find connections
* People searches
* Profile views
* Days active
The bottom line is this tool could be encouraging the right kind of behaviors that LinkedIn wants people to use the platform for! Your social positive approach might the daily affirmation that you give through endorsements. You us LinkedIn as a way to thank others, recognize an work anniversary, or new award. Use LinkedIn as energized focus. You can foster a sense of well-being for colleagues, or inspiring a connection to higher levels of business performance in their skill set. Reward excellence is always a welcome experience.
There has been much banter within the LinkedIn training community of which I am a part of talking about LinkedIn using this tool to get people to upgrade to their sales navigator product which you will see reference to on the bottom of the SSI page when you access it. Regardless, I think it encourages the savvy users to become even more focused on how they use the platform and I hope it encourages novice users to see how powerful the platform is in building and maintaining their professional brand reputation.
On LinkedIn, your core competencies brand you as the logical choice for the business you seek, and inspires trust. You are secure in the knowledge that you are being taken on face value, and perceived as eminently capable by those within and external to your professional network. All this helps you tell your story better in the real world. – www.owlishcommunications.com
Some of my colleagues liken this new SSI tool to the social media Klout score because it ranks your social activity, again I think it is a measurement that may offer you some insight as to how you use LinkedIn and how you might improve your results based on the data.
