LinkedIn Social Selling Index: What’s Your Score?
LinkedIn can be a tremendous platform to reach prospects and keep in touch with past clients. Unlike other social media networks such as Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn focuses only on business. It lends authenticity to your work and the value you provide to clients.
How to Stand Above the Competition
A recent search of “freelance” and “LinkedIn” yielded 114,000 results over a 24-hour period, while “freelance LinkedIn graphic designers” generated 142,000 results. Within LinkedIn, a search of “freelance writers” in the United States produced 15,922 results.
Clearly, there’s a lot of competition. How can a freelancer stand out? Aside from the obvious—uploading a professional photo, stressing benefits you provide clients (not just descriptions of assignments), including references and links to your work—there’s a tool that can guide you as it measures your progress.
LinkedIn Social Selling Index
The Social Selling Index from LinkedIn is a quick way to assess your profile and locate areas for improvement. Click on this link for a personalized, overall score and breakout of four areas—or pillars, as LinkedIn calls them—of social selling: brand, people, insights and relationships.
Promoted primarily for sales professionals, the Social Selling Index is also provides useful for freelance professionals. After all, selling is essential to our livelihoods.
The rules? A high SSI is good—the higher, the better—with a maximum score of 100.
The four pillars represent:
- Creating a professional brand
- Finding the right people
- Engaging with insights
- Building strong relationships
Your SSI score is updated daily. In the top right corner, you’ll find your percentage rank by industry, as well as your rank within your personal network.
How to Increase Your Score
Advice comes from the top-level salespeople I interviewed for an article on how they achieved a high SSI. They recommend providing quality information prospective clients will find valuable, using LinkedIn consistently (daily, including weekends) and connecting with the right people to grow your network.
What are you doing to build your LinkedIn profile? What’s your Social Selling Index? How has LinkedIn helped you as a freelance professional? Contact me with your response for a future article.
Authored by Cheryl Syrett
Cheryl Syrett is a marketing communications writer and editor and former board member with Freelance Forum. You may reach her at cherylosyrett@gmail.com and connect through LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cherylsyrett.
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