Social Media Today: How To Use LinkedIn To Manage Relationships
Author Bryan Howland walks through the basic benefits of LinkedIn and offers a primer on setting up and leveraging your LinkedIn account to manage business relationships.
“Business is a contact sport – because human contact, connections, and cooperation form the cornerstones of business. Establishing, building, and maintaining relationships in a well-planned, well-executed manner will enable you to excel personally and for your company. Social media sites such as LinkedIn have given us the tools to communicate with our business relationships more frequently to build trust, integrity and credibility. As far as business relationships are concerned, LinkedIn is the social media king with over 65 million members in over 200 countries and should be considered one of your most valuable business assets.
Some of us, sorry to say that includes me, started managing business relationships with a Rolodex. We gathered business cards, sent notes, made a purposeful phone call and occasionally setup a meeting during an industry conference or forum. Maintaining relationships was a tough task that was made a little simpler with Microsoft Outlook and the Internet. But you still needed radar to keep up with your contacts when they changed jobs – which occurs on average every three years.”