With the rise of LinkedIn, you have probably heard many financial professionals ask what the return on investment (ROI) of social selling is. You may also have heard the advice that you can't fix what you don't measure.
When you start to peel back the layers of the onion, you discover that many financial professionals are not tracking their social selling activities like they track their other, more traditional activities, such as phone calls, meetings, open talks, etc. This makes it very difficult to track the ROI of social selling. To answer the ROI question, financial professionals need to begin to track their social selling activities the same way they tracked phone calls in the 1990s.
LinkedIn has made tracking ROI a bit easier since introducing the Social Selling Index (SSI) score over a year ago. SSI makes it easy for financial professionals to gauge how well they are using LinkedIn. When your score goes up it shows you are active on LinkedIn, and when your score goes down it lets you know your activity level has dropped.
SSI is made up of 4 components:
- Establish your Professional Brand
- Find the Right People
- Engage with Insights
- Build Relationships
The two components based around activity are Find the Right People and Engage with Insights.
Find the Right People is tied directly to how actively you are using LinkedIn's tools to seek out new prospects, and Engage with Insights is based on how often you are either sharing content or engaging with content on LinkedIn.
