Social capital is very important in today’s world especially online on social networks like LinkedIn.
Today the sentence “It’s not what you know, but who you know” speaks more truth than ever before as people are the ones that will help you grow.
But we can get caught up in growing our social capital and forget about the aspect of managing it.
There are many ways to manage your social capital that will increase your productivity and the ability to extract value from your network.
But first, an important question:
What is Social Capital?
Social capital is your personal relationship deposit box. It brings interest to well-used opportunities and grows because of the value you bring to the table. And vice versa.
It gives you access to resources, favors, opportunities, and information through your relationships with your network. This is also called the value of your social capital.
This means that having more people in your network will give you access to more opportunities increasing your social capital’s value.
The value of your social capital doesn’t just increase by the number of connections you have. It’s also increased by the strength of your relationships with those connections.
But while connecting with people and developing relationships is important to building social capital you will also need to manage social capital for it to be used optimally.
The Importance of Managing Social Capital
We mentioned that having a lot of connections doesn’t mean your social capital has value, building relationships with those connections is what gives it value.
But as the number of your connections grows it becomes much harder to keep track of all of them leading to you not being able to extract value from them.
This is why managing your social capital is so important.
Instead of trying to hit your networking goals in a messy bunch of connections and getting lost, a well-managed network will let you focus on what’s important; Building relationships.
Here are a few ways you can manage your social capital on LinkedIn.
5 Ways To Manage Your Social Capital on LinkedIn
Organize Your Network Data
The first step to managing your social capital is to take a deeper and wider look at it. Doing this will give you a better idea of what state your social capital is in.
It’s important to have everything in one place and monitor changes in your network so you know what’s happening to your connections and how your social capital is changing.
This is where the LeadDelta Dashboard feature will help you take a better look at where your connections are from and what they do.
The second step is to actually organize the data of your network as having key information about your connections present at all times will help you make better decisions.
For instance, knowing when you last messaged someone will let you know that you should either restart the conversation or think of removing the connection if they don’t give you value.
Other information like their workplace, location, and LinkedIn headline… will help you in making better decisions about how you should approach building relationships with people and how they can help you grow.
LeadDelta’s CRM view can help you by displaying all the important data about your connections with the power to filter your whole network.
There’s no point in managing something if you don’t know what you are working with.
Categorize Your Connections
Having a huge network of connections means nothing if you can’t find the exact people you need for your current situation.
Imagine needing to find investors for your new business but with 3000+ connections in your network how can you remember which one of them is an investor?
This is why having a way to categorize your connections is so important.
Create categories that are important to you and that you want to keep track of. While talking to people put them into a category (Investor, lead, recruiter…).
When you need people from a certain category you can just pull it up and you will have a list of people that can help you with what you are doing.
Pro Tip: Use LeadDelta’s Tag feature to create custom categories and tag people with them essentially putting them into categories.
Once you want to look up people from a category just pull up the filter bar and select the tag you want to. LeadDelta will list all of your connections with the tag.
Keep Your Network Up To Date
While adding new connections to your network does increase the value of your social capital initially as you can start new conversations and build relationships it’s not good to just let them sit idle.
If you aren’t doing anything with those connections you aren’t getting any real value and they are only hurting your ability to manage your social capital.
This is why going back to your network every once in a while and looking at connections you don’t have value from is crucial to keeping it up-to-date and well-organized.
Once you find those connections and are sure they don’t bring you value, you should remove them from your network. Having fewer connections makes it easier to manage the important ones.
Pro Tip: Using LeadDelta you can look at connections you haven’t talked to in a long time and tag them for “future disconnect”. Or while scrolling through your network apply the tag to people you don’t think add value to your social capital.
Once your list gets big enough you can use LeadDelta to remove connections in bulk and repeat the process every few months.
The goal is to have a smaller network full of valuable relationships rather than a big one with shallow relationships.
Keep Notes About Your Connections
Growing the value of your social capital is about growing relationships with people which we do through conversations with them.
To build better relationships we need to remember all those small details that were said during a conversation.
Those small details are what make a difference between just a conversation and building something bigger as people love when you remember small details and are more likely to offer you favors and opportunities.
That’s why you should be keeping notes on your most valuable connections and updating them with every new conversation you have.
This is where LeadDelta’s Notes can help you keep track of all the details about your connections without having to leave the conversation.
In an instant, you can add a note, update it, and later on, you can even search your network for keywords that were mentioned in your notes.
As your network gets bigger you won’t be able to remember everything about your connections, keeping notes is the way it has been done for centuries.
Use Workflows To Manage Contacts
While having your social capital stored on LinkedIn is alright, there’s so much more you can do with it.
Most of us have our own businesses and want to extract the value from our LinkedIn networks and use it for growth.
You can do this by setting up workflows between your LinkedIn network and other apps you are using with LeadDelta and Zapier integrations.
For example, you can automatically store your new or tagged connections in your own CRM and use that information to better manage your connections from every social network.
Or set up reminders in your Google tasks to follow up on people by simply tagging them on LeadDelta. In this way, you can easily remember who you need to contact and what you need to contact them about.
Here are a few LeadDelta and Zapier workflows you can try out:
By creating workflows between all of your apps you are saving time and connecting and connecting all of your networks making it easier to manage your social capital and extract value from it.
The Benefits of Managing Social Capital
There are many benefits to managing social capital:
- You will be more productive and save time while networking
- You will have a deeper insight into your connections
- Your network will be filled with high-quality people
- You will easily find the connections you are looking for
- You will know when you should restart conversations
- You will be able to easily track your connections
- You will be able to automate parts of your networking
Social capital is an important asset that should be managed and nurtured every day.
By starting to manage your social capital today your future self will have huge benefits.
Conclusion
Building your social capital is great but it’s not enough. It’s easy to get caught up in connecting and talking to people and forget to manage it.
Setting up systems on how to manage your social capital is the best way to always stay on top of your network, always find people you need, and extract value from it.
With LeadDelta you can easily build these systems and manage your social capital starting from LinkedIn.
It’s time to stop getting lost in your network of thousands of connections and do something about it.
Download LeadDelta and improve your LinkedIn connections game.
