How I Increased My LinkedIn “Social Selling Index” From 35 to 77 in Just 3 Months
By: Ronke Babajide
Tags: Personal Branding, LinkedIn, Marketing, Careers, Social Media

How I Increased My LinkedIn “Social Selling Index” From 35 to 77 in Just 3 Months

Build your brand and increase your visibility with these targeted tactics—using completely free tools Ronke Babajide Jul 13·10 min read

Image credit: OhmZ.

LinkedIn is the most important platform if you want to build your brand, expand your business network, and be visible on the job market.

It’s a busy place. Everyone is vying for attention. Some love it; some despise it precisely because of the constant chatter of people trying to promote themselves.

So how can you be seen among all these people and content?

Let me show you how to increase your Social Selling Index (SSI)—LinkedIn’s internal measure of effectiveness—to achieve more engagement with your content or business or get job offers and opportunities.

What Is the LinkedIn SSI?

Your SSI determines how visible you are to others and measures your ability to sell your ideas and products. Having a high SSI is an indicator that you have the right strategy to make people see your posts, engage, and connect with you.

“Your LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) measures how effective you are at establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships.” — Karlyn Ankrom

In the past few months, I increased my SSI from 35 to 77, which puts me in the Top 1% of my industry. To put this number in context: my industries’ average is 32. At the same time, I expanded my network by 1,000 relevant contacts.

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The strategies I use ensure that thousands of people see my posts. It helps me position myself as an expert in my field and attract opportunities.

As a result, I get job offers weekly, sometimes daily, and I recently started to get offers to speak at conferences and events.

Build Your Profile Page To Reflect Your Brand

I’ve been on LinkedIn since 2011. I started building my personal brand strategically in March this year. Before this, I used it to keep my CV updated and post news about my employers.

In a LinkedIn content challenge hosted by one of the top female tech influencers in Austria, I learned the necessary basics of brand building and how to create an impactful LinkedIn strategy.

Before you set out to fine-tune your content to appease the LinkedIn algorithm, you must first create a compelling profile that reflects your brand.

“Personal branding and social selling go hand in hand. Social selling is about using the power of your personal brand to interact with your prospects on social media. “ — Usman Khalil

Profile Picture, Banner, Headline

The profile is the first thing people are curious about. They also have a short attention span. So let them know who you are, what you do, and what you’re passionate about in one glance.

Make sure you have a profile picture. People don’t like talking to anonymous avatars. A profile without a profile picture feels less trustworthy.

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Make good use of the banner and the headline section. I create personal banner images using Canva. There is a free version, and they have lots of templates you can use as inspiration.

If I have a speaking engagement or an important event coming up, I’ll use the banner to draw attention. This will attract more people to attend and build your brand around that activity.

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The headline below your profile picture is an excellent place to let people know what is important to you and what you’re passionate about. It should give a reader a good idea of what you focus on.

If you don’t add anything in the headline, it will only display your job title. People might not know what that title means and browse away.

In my case, it’s Tech and Diversity in Tech. They can also see I’m available as a speaker and that I write on Medium.

Write a headline that triggers their interest and makes them scroll down to see more details.

If you don’t have a good headline and you’re trying to connect to someone, they might ignore you because they have no clue why they should be interested in you. Use the headline to highlight both your professional and your personal focus areas.

Featured Section

Use your featured section to draw attention to your important content. You can pin the posts that show what is important to you. Pin meaningful information about your business, a post about an upcoming event, or a video where you present yourself.

The possibilities are endless, and the benefit is that posts you want to highlight don’t vanish down the infinite feed. Social media is fast-moving; this feature gives you a chance to reliably show things important to you and about you to your profile visitors first.

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I use it to highlight my interviews with women in Tech and, of course, my writing. Especially the articles that are relevant to the topics I mention in my headline.

Your profile is all about building a consistent image of you and your brand. Make sure that it reflects what you want a casual viewer to take away.

Creator Mode

If you haven’t done this yet, turn this feature on. Creator mode lets you define five hashtags that will be displayed below your headline. They show potential followers what they can expect your posts to be about

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Your Skills Sections

Potential clients, future employers, or headhunters will engage with you not only because you post the right content but they’ll also be looking for a specific skill set. You can list up to 50 skills and use them to illustrate what experiences you’ve acquired.

In today’s workplace, it’s no longer enough to have all the hard skills; don’t forget to list your soft skills. Are you a good communicator, a good listener, or a natural leader? List these skills along with your more tangible ones.

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Experience, Education, Certificates, and Volunteer Experience

You should complete your work experience and education sections. Add your licenses and certifications to your profile as well. After all, it is the CV that potential employers or clients will see.

Should you ever want to use the one-click application process on LinkedIn, having this complete and up-to-date will save you lots of time. If you didn’t know, you can export this CV to a Word document if you need a copy.

For your personal branding, the Volunteer experience section is another opportunity to show who you are. Use this to demonstrate where you’re investing resources and what causes are of importance to you. Where you volunteer time and give money says a lot about what kind of a person you are.

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The LinkedIn Algorithm

Now that you have a complete profile that’ll give visitors a good grasp of who they're dealing with, you can start creating content.

Use the following guidelines to increase your visibility and get more interaction. There are things that the LinkedIn algorithm likes. Feed it.

Post original content

LinkedIn likes original content. Just posting interesting links doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter if the topic could be relevant to people in your field; it is most likely few people will ever see your post.

Content someone else created elsewhere won’t be promoted. Other people have already posted that link, even if you haven’t seen their posts. So LinkedIn isn’t interested.

LinkedIn wants you to create new ideas and original content. If you want to post about something you read elsewhere, write a post with multiple sentences and add your thoughts to the link you’re going to post.

Tagging people or companies you’re talking about in your posts is an excellent strategy to bring them and their network to your content. But don’t randomly tag people who have nothing to do with your post. They’ll ignore you in the future.

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Don’t repost

Don’t waste time reposting content. Unless you already have high visibility, mention the original creator, and they can come and comment on your post; it will sink like a dead duck.

Again, it's not original content. LinkedIn won’t boost or show your post to your network. Unless you create your own post around it to make it relevant, you’re better off just commenting and liking the original.

Commenting and liking content on LinkedIn will make it visible to your connections as well, more so than just reposting.

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External content schedulers

LinkedIn wants to pretend that we’re on a platform of active, motivated people constantly engaging and interacting, so the algorithm isn’t happy if you use external automatic content schedulers.

Prescheduled content is a little less visible than manually posted content. That said, I still use Hootsuite to preschedule my content. There are prime times to post on LinkedIn for visibility, and I want to make use of them.

The best time to post in my neck of the woods is Tuesday and Wednesday morning at about 7:00–8:00 am. You won’t find me on LinkedIn at that time of the day. I’ve barely had coffee. I can’t post anything coherent; sorry, not sorry.

Be consistent

One thing to keep in mind is that you have to post regularly if you want to be visible. There is a reason companies have a predefined social media strategy with specific days and times to post content.

As I mentioned, people have a really short attention span. If they don’t see you, they forget about you. Try to be consistent in your approach to remain in their active memory.

You don’t have to post every day. But once a week is the minimum. If you post once a week, make sure it’s something engaging.

I have settled for at least twice a week. Tuesdays, I post my newest interview video, and on a second day, I post one of my articles or an event I’ll be speaking at or something else that’s going on.

Make a schedule, stick to it, and try to have some content up your sleeve for weeks where you don’t have time to create something!

Use video content, LinkedIn stories, and polls

LinkedIn loves video content and will boost your videos. They prefer native LinkedIn Videos over external videos.

I seldom have time to create extra videos for LinkedIn, so I stick to posting my YouTube videos, and that works too. But keep in mind that a native video will be boosted more.

LinkedIn and people love interactive content. Use polls with quick questions to get interaction. You can gain insights for reports or articles you’re writing and interaction from people outside your network who wouldn’t normally engage with your content.

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Interact and Connect with People

Interaction is vital to get more visibility on LinkedIn. Don’t expect your content to be seen by people you’ve never interacted with.

Set time aside every week to comment, like, and interact with other people's content. If you left a comment or like on one of their recent posts, the probability is high that LinkedIn will show them your next one.

But, don’t leave comments like “agree” or “well done” that show that you’ve nothing to say. Think about an intelligent reply or expect people to remember you as an attention hogger and scroll past your content.

Tag people in the comments if you think the post could be interesting for them. This will engage them with you, and the author will appreciate you giving them more visibility for their post. There is a good chance that they’ll reciprocate in the future.

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Besides commenting and liking, LinkedIn makes it very easy for you to interact and engage with people around important events in people's lives. It will always let you know if a promotion or a birthday is happening.

These milestones are important to people. They’re a good opportunity to show up, say “hi,” “congrats,” or “hope you’re well, happy for you” without coming up with ideas of your own.

If you’re super lazy, LinkedIn AI will even write the message for you. However, I recommend investing the extra ten seconds to personalize. People will appreciate you taking an interest.

Actively connect with people from your field. Send them a connect request, and add a note telling them how you found them and why you want to join their network. Adding a message increases the probability that they will respond positively to your request.

In the last four months, I have grown my network by more than 1,000 people relevant to my field and personal brand strategy.

Conclusion

Whether you’re setting out to build a new business, refine your personal brand at work, or position yourself as an expert in a field, LinkedIn is the place for you.

With the simple strategies I laid out in this article, I have become highly visible and rank in the top 1% of my network. When I contact people to connect, the probability is very high that they will accept my request.

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Since I’m not paying LinkedIn to use the paid version of the Sales navigator for insights or to find contacts, I won’t achieve a much higher SSI.

But this is the important part: following all the steps I mentioned is free. There are free versions of Hootsuite, Canva, etc., to support you. You don’t have to invest money — only time.

If you would like to chat with me about your strategy, feel free to connect on LinkedIn. Remember to add a note on why you want to connect!