Staying In Touch With People While Avoiding Personal Interactions

A Quick Survey

Do you find people to be tiresome mounds of noisy flesh?

Do group personal interactions sap you of your life force?

Do you make appointments for unnecessary root canals in order to avoid networking events and Zoom happy hours?

If you answered yes to one or more of these questions,

You Are Not Alone

Approximately 57% of the general population of the world identifies as introverted. While this has traditionally been erroneously seen as a disadvantage in the practice of networking or leadership, there are plenty of strategies you can use.

The Many Faces Of Networking

Networking is a multifaceted practice - you can accomplish a lot on LinkedIn, without leaving the comfort of your desk, you lazy bastard. In general, this is my method:

1. Getting People To Know You
2. Getting To Know People Who Know You
3. Rinse And Repeat

So let's talk about how to make each of these work for you

Step 1: Getting People To Know You

Creating content is the best way to reach people without having to go up to them cold or sending a message out of nowhere. The primary mechanisms of LinkedIn content creation:

1. Make content
2. Your first degree connections might see it
3. If anyone likes it, their first degree connections might see it

There are many things that go into a good piece of content - they tend to be educational, entertaining, inspiring, insightful etc.

You don't have to make highly produced videos with clever cuts, zooms, fancy captions, and visual effects. You're a person with unique life experiences, skills, and valuable insight. Text posts do well, and sometimes, a few words is enough to reach a large number of people.

Here's an example of concise short-form text:

Here's a long form example of me being a windbag:

It's worth saying that the number of followers and connections you have will greatly impact your first-degree reach, but you can mitigate the disadvantage of a small following by picking strong hashtags. These can help to give your content some level of visibility outside of your immediate network.

The more visibility you generate online, the more low-commitment interactions you will have. People will like, comment, follow, view your profile etc, which brings me to the next point.

Step 2. Getting To Know People Who Know You

Now that you have a number of people interacting with your content and your profile (which should be well-constructed), the next step is to interact with them in return.

Yes, I know, this is a personal interaction, but it's low commitment, and most of the 3 step process doesn't require it. Best of all, it requires that they interact with you in some way first, which lets you know that they are at least mildly interested in you as a person - which is comforting.

Anyone connected to the industries and areas you hope to reach, who interacts with your content is worth interacting with - this is how you build a specific audience filled with the types of people you are interested to meet.

Send a connection request, or, failing that, follow them and interact with their content.

Sometimes, people will ask to connect with you, that's good too. I have gotten really unexpected requests from interesting people.

If and when they accept your request, send a low-commitment initial message, and -

DON'T SELL ANYTHING.

Be cool. See if you can find out more about what they're doing and what they need, and if you can help them in some way by connecting them to other interesting folks or resources they may require.

Build your network to a critical mass while doing this and the human tendency toward reciprocity will eventually bring you things of value - these could be bits of information, new connections, opportunities, or just really interesting friendships.

If you need help with being a good conversationalist, I write a little about that here.

Step 3. Rinse And Repeat

Now that you've accomplished steps 1 and 2, your connection and followers list will have grown, which means you can now repeat step 1 with greater reach. Ideally, if you create content with regularity and don't post garbage, this will create a virtuous cycle of inbound conversations and interactions that can cause your network to rapidly grow in size.

This will also keep your existing connections from "2" aware of your presence without you needing to give them a call or message - chances are, they're introverts too, and prefer this.

Also, you'll never have to reach out to people completely cold, ever again.

Conclusion - Relatable Competence

The hardest part of all of this is coming up with something useful to say that many people will resonate with. Here's a tip: humanity is the most transferable skill. Whether you're a CEO, student, entrepreneur, or creative, the best way to reach people is to find the humanity in what you do and talk about that.

Mix that in with the technical or highly-skilled aspects of what you do and you have a recipe for a personal brand founded in relatable competence. That's the kind of person people want to work with.

Hope this helps!