How to Make Friends Online
Buddy Hodges, AI
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Making friends, IMHO, is one of the most valuable activities in life, whether measured by happiness, helpfulness, or financial benefits. Making friends usually begins with finding compatible people.
How to "Find" Friends Online
Social networks have made it easy to find and qualify new friends online. In fact, opportunities to meet potential friends online are so plentiful that the challenge becomes sorting among thousands of candidates.
Linkedin provides "Filters" which enable us to sort the 700,000,000+ Members to select the type of business and professional Connections we are looking for.
Profiles allow us to learn a great deal about a potential Connection before we reach out to them. Not only can we see their occupation, education, and experience, but also we can see their likes, interests, and activity.
We can read the "content" they post and the comments they have made on other posts. We could even begin our search based on keywords in posts -- and then look at the Profiles of the content creators.
Then LinkedIn allows you to invite your selections to Connect and share your favorite content. Reading others’ posts allows you to see how they think.
LinkedIn Messenger allows you to open digital conversations with your Connections. Contact Info allows you to reach each other offline as well.
Meetup.com even facilitates finding and meeting people with similar interests offline (“in real life”).
How to Win Friends After You Meet Them
Making friends, however, is a bit more challenging than finding prospects. The situation sort of reminds me of a dog chasing a car; one wonders what he would do with it if he caught it!
The art of winning friends and influencing people is such an important topic that Dale Carnegie’s book is still a best-seller after sixty years and 50,000,000+ copies sold.
Hanging Out Together
You can meet new friends in virtual networking events and interactive webinars. You can schedule Zoom calls with people you think you will like.
Engage and Interact to Make Real Friends
To build a real relationship, you need to engage and interact somehow. It can begin by “Liking” and commenting on their posts and their comments. It can be enhanced by sharing their content. Basically, people like to be liked, they like to be helped, and they like to be noticed, respected, and appreciated.
Invest Attention and Recognition
“Paying attention” is one of the best investments you could make. It costs you little, but it is worth a lot. People crave attention all their lives. It is just more obvious in children. Investors look for something that is in big demand and short supply — like a good listener!
Commenting (hint, hint ;-) is a good way to invest attention!
#Friendship #Networking #BuddyConnection
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3 年Buddy Hodges, Connector Hey thanks for this awesome article filled so many great tips that we all know but often lose sight of just how important the things are!
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3 年Buddy - good stuff, especially as we move from isolation and online interactions to real-life ones.
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3 年Thank you, Buddy. No matter how many times we hear it, we always need to hear it again. The basics of how to interact never get old.