Updated August 16, 2019: Unfortunately, this feature is no longer available in the free version of LinkedIn. If you’re looking for the same functionality, you’ll need to upgrade to the paid Sales Navigator or Recruiter Lite LinkedIn plans.
The message showed up in my inbox last week. The sender was asking about website accessibility for WordPress sites. And by the tone and info in the message, it was clear the person knew me.
I had no idea who they were.
It’s happened to you, right?
Did you meet at the networking event last week? Or was it the conference you attended last June? Like others, you meet people on social media, webinars, networking events, and conferences. And once you’ve interacted with someone, you want to stay in touch. You connect on LinkedIn.
Three months later, you have no memory of who the person is.
For years, I struggled with keeping track of how I met people. I tried standalone applications, integrations with Gmail, and extensions for the Chrome browser. Nothing seemed to work for me.
Until this past year when I discovered a new feature in LinkedIn that makes it a lot easier to remember who those LinkedIn connections are: LinkedIn Notes.
How LinkedIn Notes Work
With LinkedIn Notes, you can add comments to your contact and set up reminders for staying in touch. This is a really useful feature in LinkedIn that many people aren’t aware of.
Only you can see the information you add to LinkedIn Notes.
To access LinkedIn Notes for one of your contacts, go to their LinkedIn profile. Underneath the top section with their name and job title, you’ll see a tabbed section for Relationship and Contact Info.
The Relationship section allows you to add information about your contact for:
- How you met
- What you talked about
- Who introduced you
- Reminder to stay connected (with options to connect in one day, week, month, or set up recurring reminders)
- Tag with specific labels to sort your contacts
- Any other helpful information
Notes in the Relationship tab can be used to add information about your conversations as well as notes about a person’s interests, hobbies, and plans to meet each other at an upcoming event or conference.
With the Tag feature, you can tag contacts with keywords such as coworker, friend, or group/conference where you met (HighEdWeb, MidwestUX, WordCampDetroit etc.). Select the tag to see all the people you’ve added to a specific category.
The Contact Info section allows you to enter your contact’s:
- Email address
- Phone number
- Physical address
- LinkedIn URL
- Twitter handle
- Websites or blogs
You can even add birthdays and anniversaries in the Contact Info section, and then set a Reminder to wish your contact a happy birthday.
Once you’ve entered all the info for a contact, select Save and you’re done.
I’ve found the LinkedIn Notes feature to be invaluable for managing my contacts. Remember that person who sent me the email message last week? The person who I couldn’t remember their name?
I found them in my LinkedIn Contacts, read my notes, and had an aha! moment when I recalled I met them earlier this year at UX Thursday Detroit 2014.
Since I have several hundred LinkedIn Contacts, I have more notes to add to my connections. But I’ve already seen how useful LinkedIn Notes are for me.
What about you? Have you used LinkedIn Notes? Or do you use another system for managing contact information?
