When used to its full capacity, LinkedIn is a great way of building and maintaining relationships with people, business relationships in particular. Make new contacts, communicate with current clients or work colleagues, and keep in touch with the people you used to work with, resulting in more exposure and more leads for your company.

Obviously, the first step is to connect with people. You can find people you know by importing your email contacts or by simply searching their name at the top of the page. Connect with colleagues, clients, people you have met at networking events, people you have worked with in the past and people you might want to work with in the future. You can also connect to people you don’t know to develop new relationships. For example, you might want to connect with people who work in a similar industry to you, people you think you can help, or people that might be able to help you in the future.

Reach out to people in order to keep the connection active so that they don’t forget about you and your business. This way you are more likely to be in their mind if they need a service you offer. Interact with things that they post to LinkedIn such as news, useful articles or questions. If you found what they wrote or shared interesting then let them know, or if you can answer a question they have then make sure to do so. LinkedIn also automatically shares events such as birthdays, work anniversaries, and new jobs, so make sure to congratulate them on updates such as these.

You can also help your connections out by enhancing their reputation on their LinkedIn profile. The two main ways to do this are with Endorsements and recommendations; you can endorse your connections for skills they possess, vouching for the fact that they have these abilities and therefore are good at what they do. You can also recommend people by writing testimonials about them and the services or products they provide. Doing these things will strengthen the relationship between you and your connections as they will be grateful for your contribution to their profile, and they are also likely to return the favour by recommending or endorsing you.

So share the love on LinkedIn and you’ll build strong relationships with your business contacts. This will increase the amount of connections you have that trust you and are willing to recommend your services to people they know as well as using it themselves when needed.

By Madeleine Helme

Madeleine is a marketing manager and creative writer.  She loves to write blogs!