Building Relationships With Social Media

By Mary Chayko On Dec 6, 2024

Social media has become indispensable to professional networking. It is a highly efficient means of locating contacts and exchanging information and resources with them. Yet it can be easy to overlook the potential for these contacts to develop into true, authentic relationships. 

Connections made via social media can grow into relationships as real and authentic as those that are established face-to-face. While not the same as those that have a physical component – they are certainly not experienced in the same way – social bonds initiated in digital spaces can still be quite strong, friendly, and close. Here are some strategies for developing and sustaining meaningful, authentic relationships via social media.

✚ Bring humanity, heart, and humor to your social media profiles and postings, and you will attract the same. Keep photos and bios up-to-date and suggestive of your authentic self. Add occasional light-hearted content about your personal interests from time to time. Be interesting, be positive, be you! 

✚ Use social media to get a sense of the key issues and debates in your field and then begin to join the conversation. Engage others by being both professional and personal – a “whole person.”

✚ Systematically curate and build a list of contacts who respond to this kind of outreach. 

✚ Then, follow some of the more intriguing people whom these new contacts follow! Most social platforms allow you to view lists of individuals and groups whom your contacts follow. Add contacts from this list, including those in fields different from your own. This will increase your potential pool of relationships, diversify your networks, broaden your horizons, and provide a whole new perspective on what you do and why. 

✚ Eventually, some of these contacts will follow you back and engage with you. As with face-to-face encounters, you will resonate with some of these people more than others over time. 

✚ At the same time, be alert for inappropriate or unwelcome interactions and scams, and do not hesitate to unfollow and block anyone whose interaction doesn’t feel right or who deals in negativity. Report harassment or abusive behavior to the platform, or, if necessary, the police, immediately.

✚ When the time is right, take some of your digital relationships offline! Research indicates that social media is very effective at driving face-to-face interaction. Suggest coffee at conferences or group meet-ups. Do this in public places and during the daytime. 

✚ Once initiated, keep these relationships alive with regular (though not constant!) interactions, responses, “likes” on posts, short notes or affirmations, etc. Many face-to-face conversational norms apply here. 

About the Author: Mary Chayko, Ph.D. (http://marychayko.com) is a sociologist and professor at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information. She is the author of Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life (3rd edition, Sage Publications), among other books and published articles.

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