Social Selling Index (SSI): Unlock Your Potential on LinkedIn
Kelly Carrow
4/17/2025
Sales
Salespeople use LinkedIn to build their personal brand and reach potential clients through social selling. To find out how effective your efforts are and whether they’re delivering the desired results, you can use the LinkedIn Social Selling Index. With just one click, it shows how you're performing compared to other users.
Find Out How You're Performing on LinkedIn
The LinkedIn Social Selling Index is a numerical score that reflects how well you're doing on LinkedIn. It shows how your activity on the platform supports your sales efforts and how you compare to other users in your industry.
It’s a free tool available to every LinkedIn user. Just click the link: www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi to check your score.
The Social Selling Index Reflects Your Current Position
The index ranges from 0 to 100. A score above 70 is considered very good. Most average LinkedIn users typically fall between 20 and 50 points.
How are you doing on LinkedIn?
| SSI score | |
|---|---|
Do you use LinkedIn just recreationally, or not at all? | 0–40 |
You know the basics of LinkedIn, but you need to engage with it more regularly and actively. | 41–50 |
You have a well-completed profile and occasionally publish interesting content. | 51–60 |
You have a good foundation for successful social selling. | 61–70 |
In social selling, you are performing above average in your field. | 71–80 |
You have built a strong network and fully utilize LinkedIn for business activities. | 81–90 |
Social selling na LinkedInu máte v malíku. | 91–100 |
The index is calculated for the past 90 days and is constantly updated. This means you always know where you stand and how your activities are helping to improve your score.
4 areas evaluated by the Social Selling Index
The Social Selling Index is based on four pillars, each measured separately. In each of these areas, you can score a maximum of 25 points, and their sum gives the total index value.
These four areas are:
- Building a professional brand – This evaluates the completeness and accuracy of your profile, including having a profile photo, a filled-out work history, and recommendations.
- Searching for relevant contacts – This measures how effectively you search for relevant contacts and how you use paid tools like Sales Navigator to enhance the process of finding new connections.
- Engaging with the network – This tracks whether you create relevant content that is useful for your followers, sparks user interaction, and generates discussions in the comments. It evaluates the reach of your posts, how many comments, reactions, and shares you receive.
- Building strong relationships – This evaluates whether you connect with decision-makers in your industry and how you respond to connection requests.
You can then conveniently track all your LinkedIn leads in the CRM. We recommend trying the free demo version to see if and how it can make your work easier.
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How the index shows what to improve on your LinkedIn
The LinkedIn Social Selling Index quickly shows you how you're performing in these four areas and which one needs improvement. For each area, we’ll provide a few tips on how to strengthen your metrics.
Building a Personal Brand
Complete and refine your profile – Don’t just fill it out as a task. Pay attention to each section, and feel free to add your own banner to the header. Your profile should appear authentic.
Add interesting content to your profile – Pin articles, case studies, and other valuable content to your profile that you want all visitors to see.
Be visible – Publish interesting and valuable information on LinkedIn, and engage in discussions under other posts to attract users to your profile.
Collect recommendations – Ask colleagues and close professional contacts to leave recommendations or highlight skills mentioned on your profile.
Strengthening Your Network
Connect with relevant people in your industry – Use filters to search for them or take advantage of connection suggestions provided by LinkedIn.
Respond to connection requests – Only accept requests from contacts that are relevant to you, and reject others.
Send personalized requests – If you don’t know the potential contact personally, always write a personalized message explaining why you’d like to connect.
Join industry groups – LinkedIn has a Groups feature that works similarly to Facebook. Try finding relevant groups in your industry and join them.
Return profile visits – If a relevant person from your industry visits your profile, view their profile as well, and possibly invite them to connect.
Sharing Content and Engaging
Share valuable content – The most successful content on LinkedIn is that which quickly grabs attention, is authentic, and provides valuable information. Start building your image as an expert in your field.
Share content relevant to your network – Your posts must be relevant to your contacts. Share interesting things from your industry and your own experiences, and avoid off-topic content like politics or vacation photos.
Engage in relevant discussions – Regularly react to others’ posts, but only comment if you have something meaningful to contribute. Never force your opinion into a conversation.
Deepening Contacts
Stay in touch with your network – Regularly comment on posts from important contacts or congratulate them on their successes. This will keep you visible to them and to others in their network.
Thanks to the regular updating of the index, you can immediately track how your activities contribute points to your overall score.
Social Selling Index will support your business
A higher index value guarantees you a better position on the network and in business. The higher your score, the greater the reach of your posts on LinkedIn. This allows you to connect more effectively with important people in your industry or in the industry of potential clients. It will also help you present yourself as an expert and authority in your field.
This can open doors to further business opportunities. Data from LinkedIn shows that salespeople with a higher Social Selling Index have more business opportunities and are more successful at closing deals.
If you want to focus intensively on social selling on LinkedIn, you won’t get far without LinkedIn Sales Navigator. How this advanced LinkedIn feature works is described in a separate article.
Kelly used to work as a freelance translator and later got into marketing, content creation and software localization. At Raynet, she works on making the CRM system more friendly towards English-speaking users, expanding the Knowledge Base, and writing articles.
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