It's been a few years now that social selling is on the rise, literally taking over traditional sales prospecting and lead generation methods.

But what is the Social Selling Index LinkedIn Score? How to increase it? Where to find it? We answer all your questions about the LinkedIn SSI score in this article.

1°) How to find your LinkedIn Social Selling Index score?

I'm pretty sure that's the first question you have in mind about the SSI even before knowing what it is!

Here you go, you can get your LinkedIn SSI score for free here:

2°) What is the LinkedIn Social Selling Index?

The Social Selling Index (SSI) is a tool that has been built by LinkedIn to measure if you're a good social seller on their platform or not.

LinkedIn has been promoting social selling for a lot for more than a decade now, to promote this way of selling, they used the SSI to gamify the social selling process.

In other words, the social selling index measures your performance has a social seller.

3°) What is a good social selling index score on LinkedIn?

A good SSI score is above 75%.

The social selling index score goes from 0 to 100. On average people have a social selling index score between 40 to 50.

Top performers have a sales SSI above 65 and social sellers in the 1% have a score above 75%.

4°) How to increase your LinkedIn Social Selling Index score?

There are multiple ways to increase your SSI.

What I did to increase my SSI score

To increase my SSI score, I mostly used my social selling software, Breakcold but also some other tools.

How I increased my 'Build relationships' SSI score

This SSI score section is my favorite, I have the maximum score possible, here's my playbook.

1/ Engaging everyday with my social selling feed

1 hour per day, I like and comment LinkedIn posts from my favorites B2B influencers but also posts from a curated list of prospects I built.

I split my prospects between warm leads and cold leads so my prospecting feed adapts accordingly.

2/ I send relevant direct messages using company news of my prospects

When I'm ready to reach my prospects, I click on send direct message inside Breakcold. Then it will populate the company news of my prospects so I have all the necessary information to craft a hyper-personalized LinkedIn DM.

How I increased my 'Establish your professional brand' SSI score

This one is pretty basic, you just need to work on your professional personal branding.

1/ Use a memorable LinkedIn headline, bio and name

You can see on this picture that I used the hammer emoji with the icecube emoji to brand myself but also my SaaS product that is called Breakcold. You can do the same for your industry.

2/ Filling my LinkedIn profile to its fullest and adding CTAs (call to actions)

This part of the SSI score requires you to basically fill your LinkedIn profile, so this is what I did here.

How I increased my 'Find the right people' SSI score

This part of the SSI score wants you to add relevant people in your LinkedIn network (similar industry, similar locations and so forth).

1/ I used LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find people who posted in the last 30 days

Why in the last 30 days?

Because I want to engage or do LinkedIn prospecting with people that are actually active on the platform. It's also something that LinkedIn values in their social index score.

2/ I added the people found in LinkedIn engagement lists

Once I found people on Sales Nav, I pushed the data into my LinkedIn Engagement Tool to be able to engage with them properly as it's a huge factor for the SSI score.

3/ Setting up a LinkedIn Sales Pipeline

By following a strict sales routine, you'll get a better SSI score.

How I increased my 'Engage with insights' SSI score

Nothing fancy here, I just sent LinkedIn direct messages as much I could to boost the engage SSI score.

5°) How does the Social Selling Index algorithm work? Analysis of my personal LinkedIn SSI score

I have a pretty decent SSI score: 74/100. Let's see how this is made of together.

Team SSI Rank

First, you have the team SSI Rank, my co-founder is not active on LinkedIn so he's not even in my company team.

Industry SSI Rank

I am in the software and development industry, seems like I'm in the 1%, not too shabby.

Network SSI Rank

My LinkedIn network is strong, they all have a crazy personal brand, you can see here that I'm only in the top 12% in my network.

Current Social Selling Index

It's now time to dive into the social selling index algorithm itself. According to LinkedIn, the SSI "measures how effective you are at establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships. It is updated daily."

The 4 SSI components

Your score out of 100 is made of four different components that each can grant you 25 points. This is how it loos on my profile.

SSI component 1: Build relationships

From my experience with this part of the SSI algorithm, it's all about liking and commenting LinkedIn posts regularly.

SSI component 2: Establish your professional brand

From my experience with this part of the SSI algorithm, it's all about completing your LinkedIn profile with as much data possible and having LinkedIn recommendations as well.

SSI component 3: Find the right people

From my experience with this part of the SSI algorithm, it's all about using the LinkedIn search bar to find prospects, having good LinkedIn invite acceptance rates as well as paying LinkedIn Sales Navigator to a certain extent.

SSI component 4: Engage with insights

From my experience with this part of the SSI algorithm, it's all about having conversations in the LinkedIn inbox regularly.

People in your industry

This part of the SSI score gives your more insights about your industry and how you compare into it.

People in your team

This part of the SSI score gives your more insights about your team and how you compare into it.

People in your network

This part of the SSI score give your more insights about your network and how you compare into it.

6°) Common questions about the Social Selling Index

I tried to collect some other regular questions about the Social Selling Index.

What is the other name of the social selling index?

Simply "SSI" for Social Selling Index.

Do salespeople with a higher SSI score outperform sales reps with a lower SSI score?

My quick response: no.

According to LinkedIn, social sellers outsell their peers but it's definitely not correlated to their SSI score or is it?

LinkedIn claims that social sellers can create 45% more opportunities than peers with lower SSI. Technically, people with a better SSI score have a more beautiful LinkedIn profile that is social selling oriented.

However something makes me think that this type of data shared by LinkedIn serves another purpose.

Does having LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you increase your SSI score?

LinkedIn's objective is to make one thing: money. Their bread and butter is LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

You can see on the picture below that they want to push you to subscribe to Sales Nav because it could boost your SSI score by 20% in six months.

My personal thoughts on the Social Selling Index for sales prospecting

From my experience, I don't think that the social selling index matters that much to nail your LinkedIn prospecting. It's rather an indicator to know if you have a decent LinkedIn profile or not.

Don't forget that the SSI initial purpose is to serve LinkedIn marketing strategy, nothing more.

Nevertheless, I'm pretty sure your LinkedIn SSI score can influence on the reach of your posts and your discoverability in LinkedIn search engine. However, I have myself a high SSI score but don't have a significant reach or whatsoever.