Let’s face it. Keeping in touch is hard work. Even though we meet so many cool people through our lives, it’s difficult to be constantly caught up on how their lives are going. This is the case for most of us, even despite the fact that we genuinely want to know. Various social channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn help us implicitly catch up with our contacts. If we are lucky, we may catch a relationship status change or some major accomplishment among the stream of other junk. However the vast majority of the time, we either miss an event we care about or there is simply no event. Our favorite people become suppressed by meaningless clutter.
Social media overload buries the people that we actually care about under “the most recent” information; instead we rely on in-person interactions to strengthen our ties. In-person interactions are great, but as our lives enter new phases in new cities, this becomes increasingly problematic.
Still, I can think of more than a few friends who seemed to solve the problem of keeping in touch without in-person interactions. These friends are surprisingly good at reaching out and catching up from time to time. They share a set of qualities that are smart ways to improve how we keep in touch. These are the top five things we can all do to stay in touch better.
5. Start with the Simple Things
When we normally want to stay in touch with someone, chances are that they want to stay in touch with us too. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s just too awkward to send a message without a reason. One way that I’ve noticed that my contacts get around this problem is by sending simple things:
- Memes
- Interesting Articles
- Weird/funny Videos
When we receive simple content, it doesn’t matter so much as to the actual content that is received. The content might give us a quick laugh or spur us to share it. But this isn’t a meaningful event in any sense. On the contrary, sometimes I look at the content and have no idea why it is in my inbox.
What actually matters is the person who sent the content. They might have sent it because that they think we would find it fun, or perhaps they just want to catch up. Either way, this is a great way for them to stay in touch with people that they care about.
Keeping in touch with friends with simple content is a low-hanging fruit. It’s a quick method to renew a conversation with a recent contact. However, when thinking about people that we haven’t spoken to in a while, this kind of content may not be enough. When sending simple content, it is important to remember all of the people that we want to stay in touch with. We should make sure to send to a new mix of people as frequently as we can manage.
4. Send Memories
Resurfacing happy memories that we shared with our contacts is a great way to get back in touch again. However, it takes a lot of work to remember a specific event with a specific person from an unclear amount of time in the past. Facebook and Twitter have started to address this by resurfacing posts and photos that happened an integer amount of years ago. These resurfaced posts are convenient methods of reconnecting, but they may not encompass the most important memories.
Contacts that stay in touch well are very good at remembering important memories or funny events from the past. They take initiative to capture photos, or they write in a journal about their experiences.
For contacts that we really care about, it is certainly worth saving our memories more formally and storing information in an organized manner. In turn, when we feel that we need to get back in touch with one of our contacts, we can easily resurface a funny memory from the past. A poor memory should not keep us from joking with our contacts about circumstances from the past. To stay in touch in the future, it is important for us to take initiative by saving snippets of information as they occur.
3. Send Contextually Relevant Content
Relevant messages are the most natural type of message that our friends who are good at staying touch send. This kind of message requires us to follow current events — both personal and public — and to connect these events in meaningful ways to the people that we want to stay in touch with. Many of us do this already, but those who are exceptionally good at staying in touch are able to do this effectively using a few smart strategies:
They send differentiated and personal holiday wishes
When holidays come around and it’s time to send out that “Happy New Years” message to some contacts, they make sure to take the time to catch up on their contacts lives and use the opportunity to spur a great conversation.
Their birthday wishes have extra pizzazz
Their birthday wishes include a message that makes us laugh or smile, and they might even include a collage of images to resurface old experiences. We can immediately see and appreciate the extra energy put into each message.
They send articles and content that align with their contact’s interests
Our friends who are good at keeping in touch do a good job remembering which contacts are interested in what. Their friends are on the top of their mind, and they have an impressive ability to keep track of what we care about. The content that they ultimately send restores a bond in our relationships: it lets us know that our friends care about what we care about.
2. Send Handwritten Catch-up Messages
Handwritten messages are not obsolete. Sending postcards or letters to friends is an approach used by people who are good at keeping in touch to reconnect with contacts who they haven’t spoken with in a long time. Even though email is convenient and fast, sending handwritten messages exhibits a willingness to nurture a relationship that email cannot portray.
Here’s a digital postcard for the readers that have made it this far (retroroadmap.com)
My grandmother used to have me hand-write email messages to send to her relations in Nigeria, and I was always so annoyed when she asked. However, the true value is clear to me now after receiving handwritten mail from some of my dearest friends. Handwritten letters have personality, emotion and are a great way to reconnect with a contact that we haven’t spoken to in a while.
It is important to remember that technology is just a Medium (is this meta?), and that strong relationships can be built without it. I sometimes find myself wondering how frequently people stayed in touch with contacts in distant places before the Internet.
1. Genuinely Care
The most important habit of friends that are good at networking is that they actually care about us. These friends are there for us whether we are up or down. They will reach out to us and ask if everything is going okay with no intention of gaining something for themselves. They are ready and willing to put in work for little-to-nothing in return. These friends are keeping in touch with us because they genuinely want to know about our lives.
Staying in touch with friends should not be a chore; rather, it should be exciting and desired. We should want to bring our friends along in our journey, but more importantly to follow them in theirs. Every relationship is a building block for success and happiness. I sincerely believe that it is important to cultivate each one. Being able to adopt a few key steps with our important contacts will naturally lead to joy within ourselves and our friends.
As a good friend told me once:
" We have small ships and big ships, but the best ships are friendships"
Let’s make sure we always strive to keep our friendships healthy.