LinkedIn is a great tool for doing follow up after meeting someone at an event, for coffee or when you’ve exchanged business cards after a long flight back from the east coast. I often send LinkedIn invites as my follow up, and then use it to keep in touch and up-to-date with what is happening with the person I’ve taken some time to get to know.
If you decide to use LinkedIn for this purpose as well, make sure that you are more than occasionally updating your status, while also checking your connections’ status updates, links, blogs, announcements, reading lists or whatever else they have shared there.
Try to interact with others when it’s relevant and sincere, and use it as a way to send support, congrats, resources, news or info you think they might truly find useful. And, whatever you do, don’t use it to try to “leverage the useless.” (More on that in my next book!)
