TL;DR: Grow your network, retain your contacts, and keep all the messages, using LinkedIn.

I am not going to explain LinkedIn to you. That’s easy.

I’m going to explain how I use LinkedIn, and surprisingly, it’s not for jobs even though that is the primary use case.

Emails

When it comes to contacting people, the best default way to reach out to people in a business context, whether its to ask for a 1 on 1, to ask a question, to send a celebratory work milestone, or create any form of business-centric chatter, is LinkedIn.

Replace “emailing them” with “DM them on LinkedIn”.

Here’s Why:

Professionals can give you their work email, or their LinkedIn. Ask for the LinkedIn. That professional will one day leave, and they will lose the entire relationship with you if they don’t have you on LinkedIn, or if you don’t have the chatter on LinkedIn.

Students can reduce email noise, but also keep growing their network. That network is important for you 2 to 10 years from now. Seeing what the people you are up to work wise, is a moment for you to reach out to them and maintain some form of communication. You can build a relationshp with one message per year. You can’t really do that in email as much, as it’s hard to see what people are up to unless you directly ask for it.