Recently, I’ve been involved in so many discussions about the added value of expanding your network. Some think its a waste of time, others see it the other way around.
From my personal experience, increasing your Network base especially on professional platforms like LinkedIn, is very beneficial, so for those who are wondering what the purpose is or what’s the added value, below are a few lessons learned of how I personally found it useful:
- Mentoring / Assistance: In many cases, I connect with people and they send me a thank you message for connecting with them and indicate that they are new in a certain community or platform and wonder how they can start on so I help them out get started. Some people feel shy or not comfortable taking a first step so why don’t you take the first step.
- Enhancing the Community Engagement: Mentoring and assistance lead to enhanced member engagement within any community as soon as individuals get their head around it and understand how much of an amazing platform or community it is. Everyone of us should have a sense of responsibility towards the community they belong to and to one another.
- Connecting in Person: I connected with people in person via connecting through professional online platforms and became friends with some of them.
- Learning from Others: Don’t underestimate the power of learning from others experiences. It is amazing and I did learn a lot from so many individuals I virtually connected with.
In summary, Networking has so many advantages of which one of them is Building Relationships. You just need to look at the positive side of things and look what’s beyond the number of connections you have. I am not saying I am interacting with all my connections, but I certainly did interact with a decent number of people. For example, interacting with 500 people out of the 10,000 in your network, is an outstanding accomplishment because while it maybe a small percentage in theory, it is certainly a significant number in reality.
Always remember, it is not about adding connections to increase your network count. It is about the whole package of being a member of a community, leading by example, contributing, helping, connecting, learning and the list goes on.
Thanks to everyone who gave me the honor to connect with them. There are lots of great people out there, so connect with people and start building relationships.
Network and let your Relationship Ship Sail towards Building Relations!
