Who are the top LinkedIn influencers of the events and meetings industry? This question was asked by Gorazd Cad. In the latest Kongres Magazine article you can see the list of the top 30 LinkedIn influencers in the MICE industry.
I am really honored to be featured on the Kongres Magazine LinkedIn Influncers List. Nice to see a lot of familiar faces and congratulations to everyone.
source: Kongres Magazine – The top LinkedIn influencers of the meetings industry
What were the rules for creating the ranking?
The list includes individuals who have more than 5000 followers on LinkedIn. The creators divided selected MICE influencers into 3 groups:
- Over 20 000 followers on LinkedIn
- 10.000 – 20.000 followers
- 5.001 – 10.000 followers
The second factor taken into account is the high Social Selling Index (SSI). The ranking includes people with a Social Selling Index higher than 70.
source: Kongres Magazine
Read the full article and meet the top 30 LinkedIn MICE influencers on Kogres Magazine website.
Source: Kongres Magazine. Great to see familiar faces on the list: Padraic Gilligan, Donna Aberley, Sabrina Meyers, David Benitez
What is the Social Selling Index?
You can check Social Selling Index for your LinkedIn profile at www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi. Click the “Get your free score” button. You will be redirected to the login page. You are logged in with the same data as to LinkedIn. After logging in, a screen appears showing the current level of the Social Selling Index. What is your SSI?
LinkedIn describes the Social Selling Index (SSI) as
a tool to measure the application by companies and individuals of the principles of the four pillars of sales on LinkedIn. Each of them is measured on a scale from 0 to 100 and has an equal weight of 25 in the factor.
Learn about the four areas that influence your Social Selling Index score:
- Establish your professional brand – your personal brand as a professional
- Find the right people – build your network and get valuable contacts
- Engage with insights – engage with the content published on LinkedIn
- Build relationships – build long-term relationships on LinkedIn
What is the Social Selling Index?
Read also on my blog:
- The Top 100 Most Influential People in the Event Industry and why I am here
- Convention bureau on social media – the best case studies
- Influencers in the MICE industry
- Twitter for eventprofs
How to improve your Social Selling Index?
Create a professional personal brand
These days people want to connect not with brands but with people they trust. Building a personal brand on LinkedIn is primarily about optimizing the profile on LinkedIn to the best level, updating it on an ongoing basis and building the position of an expert/opinion leader through the publication of posts (texts, photos, videos, polls, articles), and sharing knowledge.
What actions can be applied in this area?
- reach the master level of the profile – the so-called All – Star profile
- update data about yourself (bio, experience, etc.)
- get skill endorsements
- add content that will position you as an opinion leader
- be consistent on your LinkedIn profile
- use relevant keywords
- ask for recommendations from your clients, business partners, employers and people with whom you have completed projects
Find the right people
LinkedIn checks whether we are building a network for the network itself, or whether we are actually doing it for valuable contacts. To find the right people, find out who they are, then start searching for contacts on LinkedIn and sending out invitations. To build a valuable network of contacts, do not accept random invitations from other people from other industries or not related to your professional career or business.
What actions can you take to improve the Social Selling Index?
- search for contacts you want to have on the web in the Linkedin search engine
- before inviting a new person, always check their profile and even the website of the company they work for
- send invitations with a message, give a good reason why you would like to have this person in your network of contacts (you have up to 300 characters)
- use the “Who viewed your profile” option to connect with these people. For some reason, your profile appeared in their search results
- check suggested users by LinkedIn
- search for potential customers in the newsfeed
- search published content with relevant hashtags and identify the person on LinkedIn
- follow hashtags you are interested in and look who uses them
Engage with insights
Sharing content is, apart from relationships, the basis of social selling. And it’s a great way to build your brand and grow your network. First, define your audience, their problems and how you and your knowledge respond to them. You need to focus on posting engaging content on LinkedIn. How to do this?
- use tags and post content that interests your audience / customers
- share articles
- take part in discussions
- create polls
- run LinkedIn Live
- join LinkedIn events
- comment, recommend, share
Build Relationships
So what if you make contact with several thousand people since your relationship will end with accepting the invitation? It is worth maintaining contact with key people on LinkedIn. See which of these activities you can implement:
- send invitations and expand the network
- make contact with important people, opinion leaders, experts, B2B influencers
- show interest in the content published by your audience
- maintain relationships by sending messages
- participate in the discussion
- create and/or co-run the groups on LinkedIn
Summary
I hope next time I will see you on the Kongress Magazine list. The editors encourage us to send them suggestions on those individuals in the MICE industry who have over 5000 followers and an SSI index higher than 70. Good luck!
The Kongres Magazine is a leading media for meetings and events industry in New Europe. The Publisher Toleranca Marketing is based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The company also organises Conventa Trade Show which has become the largest and most recognizable business trade show on the meetings industry scene.
source: Kongres Magazine
It is worth checking the Social Selling Index from time to time, regularly. I do it once a month. The data can help you optimize your activities – on its basis you will draw conclusions about what you are doing well and what areas need more work and improvement.
I hope this will help to improve your Social Selling Index on LinkedIn. Let me know if you have increased your SSI in the last 3 months after following the tips above.
