Maintaining Relationships

So, you’ve been friending people like crazy on Facebook and Tweeting away on Twitter for months now. You have established a LOT of relationships. Now what? Now you need to work to maintain the relationships. We’ve talked before about how a lot of these relationships are superficial. They still need work. (Who knows? It might even grow into a real and fulfilling relationship.) The following is a list of Dos and one major Don’t in social networking.

DO respond to personal messages. People will send you personal messages for various reasons. Respond. Most social networking sites make this is a fairly easy process and it a great opportunity to build rapport with you contacts.

DO tell people what is going on with you. Most social networking sites give you an opportunity to update your status. Do it. People seek comfort in commonality. This reminds them that you aren’t some business machine that friended them as a mechanical process. You go out to eat. You get sick. You watch Heroes and Chuck on Monday nights (and frankly if you don’t you should).

DO join groups that share common interests with you. This will help your contacts to get a better picture of who you are (enhancing the commonality between you). It will also help you build stronger bonds with the contacts who share similar interests. They won’t know you happen to be a Harley Davidson freak if you don’t tell them. This is how you do just that.

DO make an effort to pick people on your friends list that you haven’t spoken to in a while and message them. Build rapport

DO NOT limit your postings to just promoting your business. This jarbles any message you were trying to send about yourself and shatters the commonality you were trying to build. Twitter uses an informal 80/20 rule. This limits business promotions to less than 20% of your communications. I don’t think that’s a bad rule to apply everywhere else.

What are some of your experiences? I’d love to hear some of your strategies for helping build/maintain your relationships with your clients.

Stay Savvy,

Stephen