With the economy in a state of disaster it is becoming incredibly important to connect with people. As you know many sites facilitate this including Facebook, Linkedin, Quora etc. We have outlined some best practices for connecting with people for a job, for seeking advice and for general shared affinities. What you will realize is that the six degrees from Kevin Bacon is really true; you just have to identify your “Kevin Bacon”.

With your goal in mind, you will want to join as many Linkedin groups as possible, they limit you to joining 50 so choose wisely. Secondly, once you have joined the groups related to your interests, you can then see who is within those groups. Furthermore, you can now search for terms or companies and review the results. The results will reveal whether or not you have common connections or common groups.

Once you have found someone that you want to reach out to and have a group in common, you can typically message them directly by selecting the common group as the relationship option. This circumvents Linkedin’s rather closed policy related to who you can contact. This is largely due to Linkedin’s business model but I think that it is detrimental to their site and business overall.

Lastly, in your message be succinct and professional. Specifically, let them know who you are, why are interested in connecting and suggest a next step. These next steps could be to connect via Linkedin, do lunch or coffee or just share ideas. As long as you follow these guidelines I have had a 100% conversion in connecting with people. Don’t wait for the opportunity to connect with people, make the opportunity by continually building your network.
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Tags   employment  facebook  get hired  hire  jobs  linkedin  networking  quora