As part of the social networking on your terms week, I believe the best thing to do is to explain how in three steps you an online professional relationship that will whoop your offline networking. An Online professional relationship can add tremendous value to your business.

Step One. You create a online professional relationship through social networking. Start connecting with other professionals through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks. Begin by looking for like minded individuals who share similar ideas and same type of conversation patterns as you online. The idea here is to lay a solid foundation for a long and fruitful business relationship by connecting with similar people to you.

Key points to remember here are that this is not the time that to start pitching your product. Instead, this is where you need to get to know your connection. Check out their profile and maybe send an initial message back and forth between each other. It never hurts to share their information on Facebook or Retweet a Tweet of theirs on Twitter.

Step Two. As you start to communicate online the thought is that you should begin enhancing the relationships that you have started in the previous step. This is when you should really feel out the relationships to see how your connection and you can work together best. Is your connection a referral partner? Are they a prospect? Maybe they will become a vendor for you? Whatever the relationship is, determine how the two of you can best work together online.

Also continue doing the steps that you did in the first step as you began to get acquainted. Continue to comment on each other’s posts, answer their questions, and share their information with your network. This is like gaining street credo with your new relationship. You have the ability to impress your new business connection how you can be of value, and they have not even talked to you. How impressive is that?

Step Three. Start taking the relationship offline now that you have built a solid relationship online. This is one of the greatest parts of using social networking. When you talk to someone for the first time on the phone after being connected with them for a prolonged duration online it is like talking to a long lost friend. The conversation goes very smoothly, because you have already laid the basic foundation and even more in some cases.

That is why an online professional relationship can whoop your offline connections. The relationship created online was developed, because of a specific reason and also there was time for the two sides to find out the similarities between them. Then when they finally talk on the phone or meet in person the relationship will be that much stronger.