Keeping in touch with people in your network is a proactive act, allowing you to pursue ties and maintain working relationships for future endeavors. Keeping your network active will open doors to many opportunities, whether in your personal life or professionally, and that will prove helpful and profitable for you in the long run.

Communicate with Colleagues—Maintaining contact with your friends, colleagues and professional associates can be valuable, especially if and when you need contacts to support your business. LinkedIn is one of the most popular social connectivity sites at the moment. In this website, you can showcase your professional status, letting your past and present colleagues know what you are currently up to.

Strategy 2: Join LinkedIn Groups

Welcome the New Members—

In order to have a Linked in profile that will garner enough positive impact towards your objectives, first you must browse through the newcomers section and break the ice with the new members. If you are looking to build new relationships or establish your own branding, introducing yourself is a good opportunity to start a conversation. You can choose to receive updates and alerts when a new member joins. When you see a new member, send a welcome message asking a question that would spark interest to start a conversation. You can also offer advice and expertise on questions that a newcomer might ask, so that you can encourage him to be involved in future discussions.

Strategy 3: Cultivate Network

Tips for Job Seekers-

In networking for business, the right introduction to the right contact is very important to establish a relationship. Your direct contacts may not hold the key for you to advance your career, but, they could be connected to someone who can. Introductions are the most solid foundation in making business networking significant. LinkedIn has made introductions to the right people digital and easy to complete with its “Introduction” feature. Profiles in LinkedIn have the standard introduction function that can help you contact your colleagues who might have connections in getting you the right job, or that promotion. Although there is a limit to the number of introductions you can make in a period, this feature is an effective tool to expand your connections and get to know the right kind of people to help you in getting your dream job. Your current connections may also be connected to an employer you wish to contact, and the LinkedIn introduction could get you the position.

Google is the common denominator for everyone. Tech newbies all the way to veterans all use Google. Organic search marketing is still vital in today’s marketing world. People need to be able to find your company organically, because that is where they do cold searches first. Despite the surge of Twitter and Facebook, the front page of Google is still very important to your online presence.

This is not to put down social media. Services like Twitter can create a buzz for your company. So can Facebook and LinkedIn. Again, it must be done right and with your audience in mind. If your customer base happens to be ironic with how they approach the social media, putting a cheesy, earnest call to action is a mistake. However, being real and funny is more likely to attract people to your brand.

The title of this post is a misnomer. There really should not be a Google vs. Social Media mentality. It is not one or the other. It is one and the other. The sooner internet marketers do this, the better for their clients. Companies need to be seen in organic search in order to be found in the first place. Being found in social media creates a buzz around the brand.

1. Don’t create your profile from your resume, create your resume from your profile. You should optimize your LinkedIn page as a professional site that is a sort of landing page for your business or yourself. Then, from that profile, create targeted resume’s are specific to each company you apply to.
2. Include volunteer and freelance work into your profile. This is good because it will show any employer that, while you may not be employed currently, you are keeping your skills up to date. Plus, volunteer work shows that you are a self starter, and don’t have to be micro-managed.
3. Don’t be a connection whore. As crass as that may sound, people who accept any and all connections are going to find that many of those connections aren’t really that helpful. In fact, even if you have a smaller number of connections, you are going to do much better with the people you “know” rather than a connection with someone you just found.
4. Pay it forward. Simply put, you just never know when paying it forward can end up paying you back.

There are many tips, tricks and opinions about using LinkedIn, and many of them are valid. Your main task with LinkedIn is let your personality and skillset shine through. Doing this will ensure that whoever finds you on LinkedIn, will discover the real you. This is great for developing a strong professional relationship from the outset, and that is never a bad thing.

Smartphones used to be the domain of business users only. Blackberry, while popular, wasn’t very consumer friendly with it’s clunky interface. Microsoft was attempting to make inroads, but their choice to cram a desktop OS into a phone made Windows Mobile virtually unusable. Palm, the pioneer of PDA’s, hadn’t updated their Treo OS in years, and it’s age was showing.

Then came the iPhone. It changed everything. Suddenly, accessing the internet on a mobile phone was fun and easy. The iPhone’s OS was elegant and easy to master. Afterwards, a slew of copycats and so-called “iPhone Killers” were released. Google eventually entered the fray with their Android mobile OS.

These newer phones gave smartphones more mass appeal, and developers eagerly created applications for the mobile devices. This made it easy for people to connect via Facebook or Twitter wherever they happened to be. Those services have since seen exponential growth. I don’t think we would have seen that without recent technological innovation.