How important is the Social Selling Index (SSI) on LinkedIn's Sales Navigator?

Social Selling Index (SSI) is very important for search rankings in LinkedIn’s search engine. This is critical if you’re looking for inbound business inquiries, new job offers or simply to grow your network with the right people.

In order to build a strong LinkedIn SSI (top 10% in your industry at least) you need to: - Have a well-built-out personal profile with relevant job title / headline, keywords, long Summary section, groups, interests, recommendations, etc. - Publish long form content on your industry niche (LinkedIn Articles aka Pulse) which are attached to your personal profile. Publishing at least 1 long form article per month is advised, and it should not be sales content. LinkedIn tracks views and engagement on these for your SSI. It helps to promote these in one fashion or another, but a great article will have some viral effect. - Post frequently (at least a few times per week) with content relevant to your industry. LinkedIn tracks engagement on these for your SSI. If you don’t have time for this there are services like Quuu that have good content pools to auto-post through Buffer, etc. - Consistently build your network by sending invitations to relevant people in your industry. When you publish Articles and Posts these get shared automatically with your network. So a large network is important to earning a strong SSI. - Leverage as many LinkedIn features as possible. Go into your back end settings and make sure you’re visible, have the right content and alerts checked off, etc. The LinkedIn team has been progressively building its targeting capabilities — the more info you provide LinkedIn’s engine the better it can rank you and the more likelihood you will get a higher SSI. Give LinkedIn some love, just like you’d do with Facebook or Google / Instagram / YouTube. - Add your LinkedIn URL to your email, articles you write elsewhere, etc. This will bring incoming connection invites. - Engage people on LinkedIn Messenger. Don’t ignore messages, even if they’re irrelevant to your goals. LinkedIn sees frequent Messenger use as indicative of high engagement in your industry niche.

Following these steps will help you drive up your Social Selling Index (SSI) on LinkedIn, which will increase your profile views, placement in search results, followers, stature in your industry, etc.

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Thank you for reading

Joshua B Lee

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