published: 23 Apr 2020
3 min read | website: www.ebr.com.au
Professional contacts are often far more difficult to maintain since most do not hold any personal connection. However, we all know that professional connections can play an important role in our professional growth and careers. So below we have listed five quick and achievable ways you can prevent your professional connections from growing cold.
Know who to prioritise
Before actually reaching out and connecting with others, it is a good idea to prioritise who you want to connect with the most frequently. With the ever increasing presence of social media and technology, our professional circles have grown immensely, so it is impossible to keep track of every single contact. Thus, by narrowing down your contacts from the most to least important, you will end up with a far more manageable list.
To sort out your contacts from most to least significant, take into consideration how important they are to you. This could mean deciding whether certain people are more important because they can help you reach a career goal or path or they give you great support during your work. You could simply stop once you have selected your top ten, and simply work on them. Or, you can select a top ten as the highest priority, then another five as secondary priority and so forth.
Keep track of who and when to contact
Now that you have a sorted list of the most important contacts to keep in touch with, it is time to make sure that you actually follow through with consistently contacting them. A particularly tedious but effective way of doing this is to have a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet may contain the person's name, job, contact details and time periods you want to meet them. If you have created a list of top priority, secondary priority and so forth, then you can give each contact scores based on their position on your importance list. So ‘1' for highest priority, who you may choose to contact fortnightly, ‘2' for secondary, who you can choose to contact monthly, and so on. While it may seem like a lot of effort to put in, being organised will ensure that you do not forget someone.
Share articles
A commonly used method to communicate with a professional contact is to share an article you think will interest both you and your contact, email it to them and share some insightful thoughts. This will help reinforce commonalities between you two and give you a reason to start a conversation.
Interact with them on social media
Use the most popular platform to keep in touch with your contacts. Whenever your contacts posts something on LinkedIn or Twitter, post a comment on it. Comments do not have to be long and sentimental, just a quick 'thank you,' or 'congratulations' is enough to catch their attention and prevent them from forgetting you. If you really cannot comment though, then a quick reaction should suffice.
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