LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI): Check & Improve Your Score

The LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) is a LinkedIn metric on a scale from 0 to 100. It indicates how well you perform in four areas on LinkedIn: establishing a professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships. You can see your own score while logged in at linkedin.com/sales/ssi. LinkedIn links to that address itself through the button “Get your SSI score”. Source: LinkedIn Sales Solutions: From SSI to AI, retrieved 29 September 2026.

Last updated: 29 September 2026. This guide shows you how to check your LinkedIn SSI in three steps, which levers feed each of the four pillars, what LinkedIn itself says about the score today, and how to turn the SSI into a weekly routine that you partly automate with CompLeadly. Prices and plans for LinkedIn Premium and Sales Navigator are deliberately not covered here.

How to check your SSI in 3 steps

1. Log in to LinkedIn with the account whose Social Selling Index you want to see. Without a login, the page only loads the empty shell of the Sales Navigator app and the score stays hidden. We checked that ourselves on 29 September 2026.
2. Open linkedin.com/sales/ssi. Technically the page lives under the Sales Navigator path, which confuses a lot of people. What the subscription itself does and whether it pays off for you is covered in our overview LinkedIn Sales Navigator: features, cost and value.
3. Read the overall score and write it down with the date. If a split across the four pillars is shown, note the weakest one. That is where you start next week.

Writing the number down with a date sounds trivial, but it is the most important part. LinkedIn does not publish a target value, so your own previous score is the only benchmark you have. More on that below under “What is a good SSI score?”.

What the LinkedIn Social Selling Index is made of

LinkedIn describes the SSI as a benchmark that measures how effectively a salesperson uses social media for social selling. The scale runs from 0 to 100, and the four areas are, in LinkedIn's words, how well social sellers “establish a professional brand, find the right prospects, engage with key insights, and build relationships on LinkedIn”. Source: LinkedIn Sales Solutions: From SSI to AI, retrieved 29 September 2026.

LinkedIn does not publish an official point split per pillar on that page. The frequently quoted 25 points per pillar come from third-party sources, not from a public explanation by LinkedIn. The table below therefore only describes what each pillar stands for and what, in our experience, feeds it.

The four pillars of the LinkedIn SSI: three concrete levers each

Every pillar has levers you can pull this week. Whether and how strongly a single lever shows up in the score is something LinkedIn does not say. What can be said: these levers are exactly the activities LinkedIn names in its description of the four areas, and they bring you visibility, conversations and replies regardless of the score.

Pillar 1: Establish a professional brand

1. Sharpen your headline. Your headline is the line that appears next to your name in every search, every comment and every connection request. It should say in one sentence whom you help with what, not just repeat your job title. A starting point for wording is our free LinkedIn headline generator.
2. Write an About section that answers questions. The About section is the only place on your profile where you can calmly explain which problems people come to you with. Three short paragraphs are enough: whom you reach, what you deliver, how to reach you. If you need a first draft, use the LinkedIn summary generator and rewrite the result in your own words.
3. Post about your subject. A profile without posts is a shop window without goods. Two posts a week on one clearly defined topic are worth more than daily posts about everything. Keep photo, banner, experience and skills current at the same time.

Pillar 2: Find the right people

1. Define your audience in writing. Before you search, you need role, industry, region and company size on a piece of paper. Otherwise you connect with whoever is suggested to you, and the pillar stays weak because the network becomes random. Our ICP generator helps you translate your ideal customer into filter criteria.
2. Search with filters, not with names. LinkedIn's People search already produces a usable audience with location, industry and connection degree, even without Sales Navigator. How to set up the People search and which filters have proven useful is explained in the knowledge base article Targeting audiences on LinkedIn without using Sales Navigator. For title variants and exclusions, use the Boolean search generator.
3. Save searches and work through them weekly. In Sales Navigator, according to LinkedIn, you can save up to 50 lead searches and 50 account searches and receive weekly notifications about new matches. Source: Sales Navigator Help: Save searches, retrieved 29 September 2026. Without Sales Navigator, bookmark the search and go through it once a week.

Pillar 3: Engage with insights

1. Comment before you post. A comment with a thought of your own under a post from someone in your audience reaches their network without you needing any reach yourself. Five such comments a day is a realistic routine.
2. Share posts that answer a question your customers have. Do not pass on industry news; explain what the news means for your audience. Content that explains beats content that announces.
3. Reply to reactions. Anyone who comments under your post has offered you a conversation. A reply within a day keeps the thread alive and turns a reaction into a relationship. That is the bridge to the fourth pillar.

Pillar 4: Build relationships

1. Connection requests with a reason. A request with one sentence explaining why this particular person feels more personal than the blank default. The reason can be a post, a mutual connection, or a topic you both work on.
2. An opener after acceptance. The acceptance is the moment the person is thinking about you. A short message with a question that can be answered in one sentence uses that moment. No pitch, no deck attached.
3. Follow up after a few days without a reply. A follow-up after five to seven days that picks up the opener is a lever that is often missing. How connecting, opener and follow-up become a system that produces enquiries is described in our guide How to use LinkedIn effectively: turn the network into a lead generation machine.

What is a good SSI score?

LinkedIn does not publish a threshold above which an SSI counts as “good”. The Social Selling Index page only describes the 0 to 100 scale and the four areas. Source: LinkedIn Sales Solutions: From SSI to AI, retrieved 29 September 2026. Target numbers floating around, such as “above 70” or “at least 60”, do not come from LinkedIn but from blogs and training decks.

What LinkedIn does say: the score allowed users to compare their efforts to competitors and others in their network. That is a relative measure, not an absolute one. So we recommend three reference points instead of one target number:

• Your own previous score. If the score rises while you are visible and in conversations, your routine works. If it stagnates for several weeks, look at the weakest pillar.
• The split across the four pillars. An overall 55 with one pillar near zero tells you more than the total on its own. The weak pillar is your task for next week.
• Your real results. Accepted requests, replies to openers and booked calls are the numbers that matter in the end. If they go up and the SSI does not, the SSI has a problem, not you.

An example of how to read the pillar split: if your total is 48 and “Build relationships” is by far the lowest pillar, what is missing is not reach but follow-up. You sent requests but wrote nothing after acceptance. Next week's task is then not a new post but an opener to everyone who accepted your request in the last fourteen days, and a follow-up to everyone who did not reply to the opener. If instead the first pillar is the weakest, you fix headline and About section before you send a single additional request. Every request leads to your profile, and that is where acceptance is decided.

Also keep in mind what the score does not measure: revenue, closed deals, the quality of your conversations. LinkedIn now says so itself, more on that next.

What LinkedIn itself says about the SSI today

If you open LinkedIn's official Social Selling Index page today, you land on a page titled “From SSI to AI”. There LinkedIn writes: “But as buyer behaviors shift and sales cycles become increasingly complex, the SSI score no longer accurately reflects the modern sales environment.” And further: “A high SSI score doesn't always represent the efficacy of a sales person or correlate with measurable sales outcomes.” Source: LinkedIn Sales Solutions: From SSI to AI, retrieved 29 September 2026.

The same page describes the comparison with others in the past tense: “It allowed LinkedIn users to compare their efforts to competitors and others in their network.” The German version of the page carries the title “Vom SSI zu KI” and says the same thing. Source: LinkedIn Sales Solutions: Vom SSI zu KI, retrieved 29 September 2026.

That is remarkable, because this very page was the reference for the score for years. LinkedIn now recommends measuring success by closed deals and customer relationships and easing the pressure around SSI scores. The score itself is still available at linkedin.com/sales/ssi, and the “Get your SSI score” button is still on the page.

Our recommendation follows directly from that: use the SSI as a routine metric against your own previous value, not as a goal. It is a usable thermometer for whether you are present on LinkedIn and whether your activity covers all four areas. It is not proof that your sales, your recruiting or your job search is working. That proof is called replies, conversations and meetings. How to build social selling as a method and measure that proof is covered in our own article on it. We have held that view for a while; see our knowledge base article SSI: improve the Social Selling Index, understand a drop, put it in perspective.

SSI and Sales Navigator: do you need the subscription?

Whether you need a Sales Navigator subscription to see your SSI is something LinkedIn does not say on the pages we checked. So we claim neither one nor the other. Try it with your existing account; it takes a minute.

Regardless of the score page, Sales Navigator mainly feeds the second pillar, finding the right people. LinkedIn advertises more than 50 advanced search filters for all three Sales Navigator plans. Source: LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Compare plans, retrieved 29 September 2026. On top of that come saved searches with weekly alerts for new matches, and lead lists. For the other three pillars, profile, content and relationships, you do not need a subscription; that work happens on LinkedIn itself.

Whether the subscription pays off for you depends on how often you build new audiences and how precise the filters need to be. The plans, their differences and the price range are summarised in LinkedIn Sales Navigator: features, cost and value. If you start without a subscription, the People search and the knowledge base article linked above will take you a long way.

An SSI routine with CompLeadly: what can be automated

Three of the four pillars consist of recurring work: visiting profiles, commenting on posts, sending requests, following up. That is exactly the work CompLeadly takes over. CompLeadly is a desktop app for Windows and macOS that runs locally on your computer through your own IP address. One caveat first: whether and how automated activity shows up in the SSI is something LinkedIn does not say. Measure the effect against your own previous score and against the replies you receive.

This is how CompLeadly maps onto the pillars:

A few details that make the difference in practice:

• Audiences without Sales Navigator. You can create an audience directly from the LinkedIn People search. The walkthrough is the knowledge base article Targeting audiences on LinkedIn without using Sales Navigator.
• InMails without credits. CompLeadly distinguishes between InMails to Open Profiles, which cost no credits, and paid InMails. You set subject, text, daily limit and time window. Setup is explained in the Auto InMail tutorial.
• Daily limits per feature. For every feature you decide how many actions run per day. That keeps the routine steady instead of coming in waves.

All features with their allocation to Basic, Premium and add-ons are on the features page. You can try CompLeadly free for 10 days, no credit card required, and afterwards keep using it for free with the basic features and daily limits.

The LinkedIn Social Selling Index for recruiters and job seekers

The name says selling, but the four pillars apply just as well to recruiting and job hunting. The only difference is who the “right people” are.

In recruiting, they are candidates with the right skills. The second pillar then means building an audience from the People search or, with a Recruiter plan, from the Recruiter Lite search instead of collecting random connections. The fourth pillar means sending a message with the specific role after acceptance and following up after a few days if there is no reply. CompLeadly handles request, opener and follow-up, and replies come together in the Smart Chat (add-on). The setup for recruiting teams is described on our page for recruiters and staffing agencies.

As a job seeker you reverse the direction. Your audience is recruiters and team leads at the companies you want to join. The first pillar matters most for you: headline and About section have to say in two sentences what you can do and what you are looking for, because that is what a recruiter reads first. After that, the routine is the same as in sales: comment on posts from your target companies, send a connection request with a reason, ask a short question after acceptance, follow up once. That, too, can be automated with CompLeadly from a People search. The SSI shows you whether you are active in all four areas. Whether a recruiter cares about your score is a different question. Judging by what LinkedIn itself writes today, probably not.

A weekly routine for your SSI

To keep the score from becoming an end in itself, a fixed rhythm helps that costs little time and touches all four pillars:

After four weeks you have four data points and know whether your routine shows up in the score. More importantly, you have counted four weeks of replies and conversations, and that is the number that moves your business.

When your SSI drops

A falling score usually has an unspectacular cause. Typical causes are lower activity, for example two weeks of holiday without posts, a campaign that ran out, or a profile that had not been touched in a year. Our knowledge base article names another possible cause: if others in your network become more active, your score can fall by comparison.

The order for troubleshooting is simple: first check whether you posted and commented in the last two weeks. Then check whether your requests and follow-ups actually ran. Look at the profile last. LinkedIn does not state how often the score is recalculated, so a weekly look is more useful than a daily one. Further causes and how to read them are in the knowledge base article on a drop in the SSI.