Have you ever wondered how many of your connections are clients, leads or potential prospects?

Do you forget to send follow up emails to some of your prospects?

Perhaps you regularly lose the notes that you have collected on your hottest leads?

Or have you ever wished you remembered how you met a particular prospect?

If any of these situations are true for you, then you would find great value from LinkedIn’s built in organizational tool, the Relationship Tab, available to both free and paid members. Even if you have not yet experienced these issues, the larger your network grows, the more valuable you will find this feature to help you keep organized and stay on top of your networking and lead generation efforts.

The feature also allows you save and record information on contacts in your network that you are not yet connected to (2^nd, 3^rd, and group connections). The benefit of this is that you can create a list of potential prospects that you would like to connect with, record information that you want to keep handy about them and then track your efforts to connect with them.

You don’t need to worry about the information that you keep in this feature as it is all private, so no one else will see what you’ve written.

Accessing the Relationship Tab

To save a connection or contact, click on the light grey star located on the left-hand side below their picture.

This will turn the star dark grey and open the Relationship Tab.

If you are connected to the person, you will see the date that you Connected to them. If you are not connected yet, it will show the date you Saved as contact.

Once you have saved a connection or contacts, here are five ways that LinkedIn’s Relationship Tab will keep you organized to build profitable relationships.

1. Notes

This section is where you can add any relevant information (personal or professional) about a contact that you might need to know or want to know in the future.

2. Reminder

As you build your network and gain an increasingly number of connections, it can be hard to remember when you should follow up with your connections. You can set reminders for 1 day, 1 week or 1 month.

You can also set recurring reminders for every week, every month, every 3 months, every 6 months or a custom range.  This is perfect to help you stay top of mind with your hot prospects, by making sure that you stay in contact on a regular basis.

3. How You Met

It can be helpful to record how you met, particularly if it was through a person you know or at an event.

4. Tags

One of the most helpful features of the Relationship Tab is the ability to Tag your connections.

Every single time you connect with a person, you should tag them and put them in a specific tagged group, based on who they are. For example, are they a prospect, a strategic alliance, or an existing client?

A good place to start can be to create two tag folders for your prospects: one for regular prospects and one for hot prospects. Hot prospects are the people you really want to stay in touch with, monitor and continue to follow up with.

5. Messages

LinkedIn makes it easy to keep track of your conversations with your connections in the Relationship tab.  In this tab, you will find all the messages and conversations you’ve had with a connection.

Simply click on the message you want to see and it will pop up on to the screen.

If you have all of your contacts organized and tagged, keeping track of who you connect or engage with becomes easy to manage. This will allow you to stay focused on achieving your goal for each relationship.

Do you use LinkedIn’s Relationship Tab functions? Do you find it helpful and easy to use? Share in the comments below.

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