Networking has become the key to career success in recent times. Whether it’s about getting a new job or getting more business opportunities.

To have an active and helpful network, you need to focus on managing online contacts. Continue reading to know the best ways to keep your online contacts sorted.

1. Bring All Contacts Under One Umbrella

Get rid of the hassle of finding contacts scattered on different platforms and put all your online contacts in a single system. To do so, you may use your official contact management software or use a separate one of your choice.

The home screen of Contacts+ web app

While collecting contacts stored on various apps and uploading them in one contact management tool, perform the following steps:

  • Delete duplicate contacts to avoid confusion and miscommunication.
  • For old contacts, verify if the information (contact number, email address, organization) is accurate.
  • If any contact information is missing, try to add it.

You can use the Contacts+ app for storing the contact information of your family, friends, and professional acquaintances. This cloud-based platform is accessible from all computers and smartphones and offers an automatic synchronization feature for Gmail, Outlook, and iCloud.

Download: Contacts+ for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)

2. Remember Important Dates for Conversations

We often tend to lose touch with our contacts, especially due to the absence of any pressing reasons to speak. Unfortunately, irregular communication will result in wasted networking efforts.

However, you can always stay in touch with your contacts by interacting with them on special occasions. Birthdays, major holidays, work anniversaries, job switches are common conversation triggers that you can use to communicate with your contacts.

You can use Contacts’ Birthdays to store such trigger occasions for all your contacts. Sync this app with your Google Contacts app, and it will send you notifications for all important events.

Besides, you may consider calling someone for job changes, visiting their city, seeing news about their company, and coming across an article or video they would love to see to have a lasting relationship.

Download: Contacts’ Birthdays for Android (Free)

3. Update Contacts Frequently

All your efforts to organize the online contacts will fail if you don't update those regularly. An obsolete contact list will be of no use, and your networking will remain unsuccessful. Therefore, you should frequently update important data about your connections.

For example, if someone joins a new company or gets a new phone number, you must update it in your contact management tool to avoid confusion. You may also want to include them in a new group if they changed their line of profession or moved to another country.

Related: The Best Features of Cloze for Seamless Business Management

Using Cloze, you can organize, sort, and filter your contact list. You can seamlessly update contact info in this tool whenever necessary.

Download: Cloze Relationship Management for Android | iOS (Free)

4. Create a Business Card Database

Though it’s the era of smartphones, many people might still share their contact info through traditional business cards. During a physical event, you meet new people and return home with a bundle of business cards. Storing these cards as they are is not the best idea.

An image showing digital business cards in Pobuca Connect

Moreover, manually entering the data from the business card into your contact app can be hectic. Hence, you need the Pobuca Connect app that offers a business card scan feature with its mobile app.

After capturing the info from a business card, it instantly syncs the latest data with all your devices. Once stored, you can edit and organize the contact for better management.

Download: Pobuca Connect for Android | iOS (Free)

5. Sync Contacts With Social Media

An image showing the people search of BeenVerified

In the present time, it’s almost impossible to find someone without any social media account. Whether you’re active on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, you’ll want to add your contacts to appropriate social media.

Related: The Best Free Apps for Managing Your Social Accounts

BeenVerified is an app that can find someone’s social media profile through their phone number. If you met someone for a brief time and only exchanged contact numbers, you can use this tool to find that person on different social platforms and add them to your social or professional network.

Download: BeenVerified for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)

6. Gather Contacts From Online Sources

Imagine you had a long discussion with a famous entrepreneur at an event. Though you gave him your business card, you declined to take his card and said you’ll gather that from his company website.

In image showing how Evercontact works

Now, you can go through adding his contact details from a webpage manually into your contact management app, or you can dd Evercontact extension in your Chrome browser and let it do the job for you.

This plugin grabs contact details including, name, email, phone number, address, and social media profiles. It’ll upload all data to any cloud or CRM with one click.

7. Group Contacts According to Relationship

Unless your contacts are sorted properly, having a database full of names and numbers will not help you with the networking goals. Therefore, grouping contacts based on your relationship with them or other parameters is crucial for contact management.

By creating categories or labeling contacts properly, you can find relevant contacts in no time. It’ll also help you create communication strategies for each group and send group messages when you need to.

You can use categories to label the contacts are friends, current colleagues, ex-colleagues, strategic partners, recruiters, professional connections, and vendors.

ContactBoss is a contact management app that simplifies contact grouping tasks. Besides organizing and searching your contacts, it also comes with a feature to create contact groups.

Download: ContactBoss for Android | iOS (Free)

8. Add/Take Notes

As a busy professional, you have a hundred more things to remember besides the topic of the last conversation with one of your contacts. But, following up on them or mentioning relevant points from the last time will surely liven up a discussion.

Therefore, you should record the crucial points you discussed with each contact in writer form. For that, you can use Evernote to keep track of the last date of conversation with a person and the topics you discussed.

Moreover, when you take notes by your hand, you have a higher chance of remembering what you have noted down.

Download: Evernote for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)

Contact Management for Easy Networking

Due to the importance of networking, people are interested in actively building new connections. However, randomly gathering contact information won't be of any use if you’re looking for a resourceful network.

If you collect contacts from your connections, you need to keep them organized in one place for easy communication. You should have no trouble organizing your online contacts by following the mentioned tips. Also, you can use Google Forms to collect contact information.