How to Form and Nurture Internet Relationships

The way contacts are formed and nurtured into solid, lead-producing relationships is evolving. Today, many relationships have their origins online.

Forming Relationships

You have probably had experiences such as these: A stranger reads an article about you or reads a post you wrote and reaches out to connect with you on LinkedIn. You sit on a virtual panel and the co-panelists exchange emails and follow each other on X. These are instances where your online presence and visibility can stimulate relationships.

Here’s a tip on forming relationships online: amplify your visibility by promoting your accomplishments with sponsored posts so they reach a larger segment of your social network and draw in prospects with whom you’ve yet to connect.

Nurturing Relationships

Nurturing relationships also has migrated online, to a degree. Liking, re-tweeting, or commenting on a contact’s posts; sending a congratulatory email when a contact earns a promotion, changes companies, wins an award, or otherwise is deserving of recognition; forwarding a YouTube video or other clip that illuminates an issue you know to be important to a contact; and reading digital (or print) business publications that cover your client profile and then following up appropriately—these are examples of ways to nurture relationships virtually. The alertness necessary to execute a strategy of online relationship-management can produce a lead.

Here is a tip on nurturing relationships online: engage with your client profile so that they appear in your feed, and you appear in theirs.  Mention a contact in a post, use the appropriate hashtags, and make what you say in your feed relevant to them rather than purely self or firm-promotional in nature.

Making It Personal

Virtual engagement is not intended to fully replace traditional engagement. So, be sure to supplement the virtual interaction with periodic physical outreach such as handwritten notes, lunch meetings, and telephone calls.

Still, technology should enhance the reach and speed of information. Technology also makes it possible to measure the reach and effectiveness of outreach and quickly test and change messaging that is not resonating with its intended audience. Thus, deploying a combination of tech and personal touches should cultivate your online relationships into leads and revenues over time.