Your LinkedIn Social Selling Index: The First Element, Establish Your Professional Brand

Recently, I reviewed the LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) in broad terms and discussed what it meant to you.

(Admit it, I’ll bet you didn’t even know you had one!)

With this article, I’ll begin to do a deep dive into the four elements comprising the SSI.

I start with the first element, Establish Your Professional Brand.

Let’s get started!

Establishing Your Professional Brand has four components as taken from the LinkedIn page:

1. Complete your profile with the customer in mind
2. Add rich content highlighting you as a thought leader
3. Increase your visibility by posting and interacting with content
4. Generate endorsements from customers and colleagues

Now, let’s delve into each of these components.

LinkedIn summarizes complete your profile with the customer in mind as:

Aim for 100% profile completion with a profile picture, headline, summary, and experience.

Their expert tip is to emphasize instances where you added value to client.

You can execute this by:

1. Having an All Start profile
2. Talking about what you can do for an employer or a client and not about yourself
3. Having a well-written profile leveraging LinkedIn’s features to highlight your expertise and experiences.

LinkedIn summarizes add rich content highlighting you as a thought leader as:

Include examples of your work on your profile in rich multimedia to share with prospects and customers in an interactive way.

Their expert tip is to post an overview of your company’s products and services via SlideShare.

You can execute this by:

1. Making regular use of SlideShare to highlight your work (In other words, it’s not one and done!)
2. If you’re self-employed have a LinkedIn company page and use it
3. Using a variety of media formats (e.g., audio, video, graphics, images)
4. Having a publishing plan.

LinkedIn summarizes increase your visibility by posting and interacting with content as:

Make it your goal to share high-quality information that is helpful and contextually appropriate for followers.

Their expert tip is to share a well-written, long-form post related to your professional experience or industry trends.

You can execute this by:

1. Create original content with LinkedIn Publisher
2. Share your own updates (Remember to stay relevant, nobody cares what costume you’re wearing to the neighborhood Halloween party.)
3. Share other people’s relevant content with meaningful commentary (Don’t forget to curate content from outside of LinkedIn!)
4. Have an editorial calendar.

LinkedIn summarizes generate endorsements from customers and colleagues as:

List your skills as a simple, efficient way to show your prospects how you can help them.

Their expert tip is endorsing connections on LinkedIn often prompts them to return the favor.

You can execute this by:

1. Giving endorsements!
2. Not being shy and asking for endorsements for yourself
3. Thanking those who endorse you and starting a conversation.

You’ve probably noticed by now that there’s no magic bullet here.

It’s all common sense which needs to be approached in a disciplined manner (i.e., a plan).

This article should give you a good idea on how to get started on improving 25% of your SSI score.

In the next article, I’ll discuss the second element of your SSI score, Find the Right People.

That’s it for now!

Please check-out my 8 step approach for developing a social media program to get some more ideas on how to use social media.

Also, never forget to reach out to either ask questions or to ask for help from someone like myself!

In the meantime, thank you for following and reading my blog!

I look forward to any and all comments that you may have. I will reply to any comments made to this blog post as promptly as I can.

And, remember!

I do this for a living and if I can be of any assistance to either you or your organization, please feel free to call on me. Our initial discussion will be of no charge to you.