Ways to Follow up With Your New Contacts after a Conference

Conferences bring a lot of valuable opportunities to develop your professional network. Although they provide significant content with deep insight, the real work starts when you follow up the contacts. A lot of people share their mutual interests and leave their business cards at the conferences. It can be a challenging task to go through the pile of business cards and contact them to build further professional network. The efforts made in conferences can benefit people in both long and short-term. To make the conferences more fruitful and manageable we have gathered a few ways that can be useful for you to follow up with the new contacts after a conference.

1. To organize yourself, it is better that you divide the collected business cards into 3 categories:

• Top priority
• Medium priority
• Low priority

2. You can make these categories on your smartphone or your tablet for convenience too. It is advised that you take notes while conferences are still running according to their priority levels. Write conversations and note down the opportunities in these categories. If you can record some conversations along with these notes, then that is going to be fantastic. After a conference, put together all of this and this will benefit you in the long run.
3. Try to contact the top priority through business emails and don’t send it right after the conference. It is advised to contact them after 3 or 4 days because if you do it just right away there inboxes are likely to be filled with conference related emails and your email of contact would be lost in the crowd. When everything settles down and get back to the routine life, then send them emails. In case, a person is feeling a bit energized, he/she should draft the emails early and schedule the emails for 2 or 3 days.
4. It is advised that when you write an email after the conference to the specific person, then you should avoid writing the unnecessary details of conference because it would seem impersonal. Rather then, you should write a personal email in which you mention something that reminds the other person of your conversation you had with him/her. You can attach some article or reference to help him/her remember you and the conversation. Write in a way that would lead to a conversation, a question or an invitation perhaps.
5. Another way to follow up the contacts is to follow the people on their social media accounts. Everyone has an account on social media. Try to find one by the information given on the business cards. You can look into Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn to follow the medium priority contacts. Sometimes you can tag them to remind who you are. Note that you follow someone’s business page and not personal one.
6. If you get an opportunity to meet the people, initiate the meeting process by asking them on a business event, on a coffee, or for the visit of your facility. Invite only those who have potential otherwise don’t waste time and effort.