Measuring Your Persona on LinkedIn

Ever wonder how your activity on LinkedIn stacks up with your peers? Up until recently, those metrics were reserved only for LinkedIn's largest corporate clients. But now they're available to everyone, and if LinkedIn is an important part of your B2B go-to-market strategy and you weren't aware of this feature already, you should check out your personal score. It's all part of their effort to stimulate more interest in their higher grade Sales Navigator product, but this is about the best measure I've seen that tracks overall LinkedIn performance.

They call it the "Social Selling Index", or SSI, and they base it on four "pillars" of social engagement: How well you've established your professional brand, identifying prospects, discovering and sharing engagement-worthy postings and updates, and building relationships and establishing trust with like-minded professionals and decision makers. More specifically, it compares your SSI with others in your industry as well as within your network of first level connections.

I was quite excited to learn that my own score at 90 put me in the top 1% in the entire staffing and recruitment industry on LinkedIn, both in-house as well as third-party. They break it down even further: I discovered that my score is actually 300% higher than average. I also learned that I rank in the top 1% among my nearly 30,000 first degree connections, with a score that is 80% above average. Good numbers, for sure, but I've always believed that if you're going to recruit and place digital marketing and ecommerce talent, not having a strong social media presence should be an immediate red flag to any employer who's considering possibly using your services, and I can certainly see how that would apply to professionals who work in other industries as well where social media is playing an increasingly important role in customer engagement.

With LinkedIn's new format, it takes some hunting around to find the SSI Dashboard, so I'll make it easy for you: http://bit.ly/LISSIndex.

Just enter your profile name, and with a quick click you'll immediately find out how comparatively effective you are on the LinkedIn platform. It's updated on a daily basis and they also show you trend lines, although there's no mystery there: It spikes up when you're active and heads down and to the right when you're not. I can speak from personal experience when I tell you that having a super high SSI score also has its downside, as the volume of inbound traffic I sometimes receive can almost border on unmanageable.

But that's a good problem to have.

Jerry Bernhart, Principal of Bernhart Associates Executive Search, LLC, is one of the nation's preeminent and veteran executive recruiters in ecommerce, digital and multichannel marketing, and CRM. With more than 80 published LinkedIn articles, Jerry is the "voice" of best practices in the recruitment and hiring of ecommerce and digital marketing professionals. Jerry is also the author of the critically acclaimed book, "Careers in Ecommerce and Digital Marketing," on Amazon, and participates in many leading digital marketing and ecommerce conferences. Jerry has been recruiting and placing marketing professionals for more than 28 years. Check out Jerry's other insights on the Thought Leadership section of the Bernhart Associates website.

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