#37: What’s your LinkedIn SSI score?

Posted on July 29, 2024 by ewand

Are you the kind of vainglorious blowhard who likes to tell everyone about all your latest achievements or humblebrag your gratitude for some amazing success / that latest certification? Some people think that’s what LinkedIn is for. With over one billion users, there are certainly opportunities for networking and sharing interesting content too, and not all of it leaves its reader feeling queasy.

There’s a scoring facility on LinkedIn, hitherto visible only to subscribers of the $100-1600 per month (yes) “Sales Navigator” product: SSI. Nothing to do with nature sites or social security, Social Selling Index is a score to tell you how well you stack up against your peers when it comes to four pillars of social selling.

It’s available to regular cheapskate LinkedIn free users too – check your score out on https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi

When Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016, the $26B price paid seemed like quite a lot, even if competitors openly moaned about it. In the last fiscal year alone, LinkedIn brought in $15B of revenue so it seems like a pretty good investment all-in. The Microsoft FY24 results are due next week so we’ll see if its inexorable growth continues (hint: it’s been adding 8-9% compared to the previous year over the last 3 quarters, so it’s seems a fair bet).

What is “Social Selling” anyway?

In short, it’s a way of identifying sales prospects and using social media to connect and interact with them. Clearly, LinkedIn thinks it’s the most likely place for this to happen, though some industries and/or demographics might find Instagram or Tik Tok to be their platform of choice.

LinkedIn claims that people who are good at social selling create more opportunities, are more likely to reach their quota, and that 78% of them will outsell their peers who don’t use social media (bad luck if you’re one of the 22% that get outperformed by old style relationship sellers). You could use the Social Selling Index to see how you stack up against those who don’t use social selling skills.

The freebie view of your SSI score doesn’t really give you any explanation as to why it is what it is, nor particularly practical tips for how to get it higher… There are plenty of articles online offering tips on how to make your SSI go up, and the somewhat dry help page for Sales Nav does give a little more info.

It’s a calculation based on 4 pillars:

Establish your brand – basically, how complete is your LinkedIn profile and how much stuff you post/share. Pepper your profile with the right buzzwords and your score might go up. Treat your LinkedIn profile like it’s your CV/resumé with at least a bit of detail of your experience, add a profile photo etc, and you should do OK.

Find the right people – how well are you growing your network with new connections? Finding new prospects and connections might be easier if you’re a Sales Navigator subscriber as the searching tools are more granular, but you can still get a long way with the built-in search and filtering tools. If you don’t want to pay for Sales Navigator, you might still find value in the less spendy LinkedIn Premium.

Engage with insights – a rating where LinkedIn looks at how you engage with other people’s content (liking, commenting) and how much you share yourself (whether it’s reposting or creating something new). Being active in LinkedIn Groups also helps.

Build relationships – supposedly “connecting and establishing trust” – though likely measured by how many interactions you have with people, like commenting on their posts or sending them messages, maybe even commenting or liking back on other people’s comments on your posts.

Normally, you’re the only one who can see your SSI, but if you get an Enterprise license for Sales Navigator, then your admin can see everything and you might be able to see how the other members of your team are doing:

If your company is paying for a Sales Navigator license for you, then it’s always possible you could find that maintaining a certain level of SSI as one of your compensable OKRs.

So, being consistently busy on LinkedIn is likely to make your social selling index go up, even if the things you do are not necessarily examples of good social selling… the maxim of “Empty vessels make most noise” may still apply to LinkedIners who spend all their time doing stuff of low value.

You’ll find lots of online resources explaining why Social Selling is A Good Thing, and how to do it better. There’s even a book about Social Selling on LinkedIn should you feel like some summer holiday reading by the pool.

582 – Edgy Profile Switching

Posted on June 4, 2021 by ewand

The “new” Edge browser has been around long enough to be just “the Edge browser”, given that old Edge is not only deprecated but being removed from Windows 10. If you’re still clinging onto Internet Explorer, then get ready for its demise; it’s got a year left, then the plug gets pulled. Plenty of ToW’s past have dealt with the Edge browser, especially the benefits of having multiple profiles (useful to keep work and personal stuff separate, or even having different sets of credentials for common sites, like demo accounts vs real users).

A feature which was added to the profile functionality was the ability for Edge to switch between them automatically – in other words, Edge would try to determine if you’re opening a site in the “wrong” profile, and it also lets you set the default on which profile should be used when you click an external link in an email or a document (other than in the browser itself). This not only changes how the site might be displayed, but also sets where the browser history is saved, and which set of cookies, cached usernames / passwords etc should be used…

You could set that a specific profile should be used for “external” links; if set to “Work”, then all external links (from other apps) would open in that profile; automatic does a pretty good job but sometimes gets flummoxed by M365 sites like Sharepoint, which could mean clicking a link to a doc in Outlook will try to open it in your personal profile, and fail to authenticate (since you’d want it to use the work profile’s credentials).

Similarly, if you had it set up to open links in whichever profile was last used or to hard-default to Work, then clicking a URL that you’d want to view in Personal might cross the streams. Fortunately, an unreleased feature could be just what you need in this scenario.

There’s a still-experimental “flags” feature set that is part of both Google Chrome and Microsoft’s Chromium-based-Edge; different releases of each browser have a changing set of flags features which can be enabled if you know they’re there and are prepared that they might not work, or at least might not work in the same way as they eventually will.

Many flags tweak how the browser operates under the covers and will never be noticeable by the average user; others enable features that are hidden by default or are still early in their development cycle.
The plan is that (in some form) flag features will be part of the mainstream release, though not necessarily in the same way. You can view the flags by entering edge:flags in the address bar.

One flag which is eminently and quietly useful in this potential multi-profile befuddlement is edge://flags/#edge-move-tabs-to-profile-window. It does pretty much what it says; right-clicking on a browser tab will let you switch it between the profiles, so if you’re presented with a login screen for a site that should be opened in the other profile, one click is all it takes to flick it across.

530 – Edge profile switching

Posted on May 28, 2020 by ewand

The New Edge Browser is evolving rapidly – if you’re still using Internet Explorer, then ditch it ASAP and move to a modern browser. If you already use the new Chromium-based Edge, it’s worth looking at the Profiles capability, which lets you keep several sets of browser settings. At a basic level, you could have a Work profile and a Personal profile, and keep usernames, passwords, favourites and so on, separate between each.

There’s a profile photo typically found on the top right of the Edge toolbar, and multiple profiles can be added and managed from there. Or enter edge:settings in the browser’s address bar.

Edge has the ability to sync favourites, passwords, credit cards, collections and other browser data all to other machines with the same profile address – so if you have a home PC and a work laptop, then having a “personal” profile on both could mean that suitable info will roam between the machines, but work specific stuff can be kept on your work profile.

Some capabilities – like syncing history between machines – are “coming soon”.

Lately, some versions of the Edge browser have been updated to sync extensions – like Lastpass, or the OneNote web clipper. Jump to edge://settings/profiles/sync within the browser itself to see the gist.

Having multiple profiles lets you consciously separate home and work stuff, keeping social media, web mail or personal interest stuff in one window, and your boring old Sharepoint sites and PowerBI charts in another. Quickly minimizing your “home” window before sharing your desktop on a Teams call is perhaps the modern equivalent of the Boss Key.

One tricky part is when you go to open a web link – other than from within a browser session itself – then the last window you were using could be the one to launch that site, meaning you might be crossing the streams and opening up work stuff in your personal profile or t’other way round. It’s possible to set a particular profile to be the default, or just let the machine decide.

One recent addition in the Beta channel for Edge – soon to hotfoot its way to the release version – is the automatic detection of work sites being opened in “other” profiles.

If you try to open a site that wants to authenticate using your work or school account but you’re using a different profile, you’d be offered the chance to switch to the correct one, so you can used cached authentication settings, cookies and the likes.

Automatic profile switching is available in Edge versions 83 and beyond – open edge://settings/help in the browser to see what version you have.