When you start out on  LinkedIn the obvious way to build your network is to connect with friends and colleagues – people you are in regular contact with anyway. After a while though you might start to add people that you know from more of a distance – a colleague in another office for example -  or that you might have only  just met at a recent workshop or conference.  Before long you have 50 + contacts and then when you look through the list you find you are struggling to remember who they are!

It sometimes takes a while for an opportunity to reconnect comes up. What can you do in the meantime to ensure that when that does happen that you will be able to hit the ground running?

This is where the handy Notes section comes in to its own.  But it’s easy to miss.  So if you haven’t noticed it before click onto the full profile of one of your contacts and then scroll down the right hand side of the page until you reach the Contact Information section. There you will find their  email address and any other information they have published eg their phone number. Under that you will find Tags and Notes.

Let’s look at Tags first.  Depending on what you have in your own profile LinkedIn might have already allocated a tag – eg colleague, classmate – but you can create a more meaningful one by clicking the  Edit Tag button. This way you can cluster people together which can come in very handy if you want to send a LinkedIn message to a specific group of your contacts.

And in the Notes box you can jot down details like – why you connected, when you said you would next get in touch, o what you talked about that could be followed up or even something you noticed in one of their updates that you would like to develop further.  These notes are for you only – they don’t see them.

Developing a network has much more potential than just gathering a list of names…those 2 small tools can really help you do that.