Are you wandering aimlessly – or worse, hiding in a corner – in the virtual world? If you signed up to an array of networking websites but now don’t know whether to connect with or simply poke someone, you’re not alone. Here’s how to network online with confidence:

1. Choose your site. Some networking sites, such as LinkedIn and Ecademy, are aimed at professional people, others, such as Facebook or MySpace, are primarily social networking sites. If you choose the latter, take care that you are not sharing your holiday snaps with people with whom you would like to have a more professional relationship. Privacy settings may not be enough to split your personal and working lives.

2. Who are you, really? Your user profile is the chance to tell people about your specialist skills, experience and interests, says Kevin Eyres, the European managing director of LinkedIn. But don’t post your entire CV online. Your profile is “a virtual signpost of me” pitched to a community of people who you’d like to work with – not necessarily for – he says.

3. Please be my friend. Networking sites are about reaching out to others, but don’t go mad, Eyres says. “It’s not a numbers game... it’s really about who do you know, who have you worked with and invite them, because you can leverage their network into yours.” If you connect with strangers you have no way of knowing whether they will be valuable to you.

4. Be proactive. Find out about discussion forums, message boards and other applications that allow you to interact with people outside your network. Join in only when you have something to say that shows off your know-how.

5. Mind your manners. You wouldn’t approach someone at a party and say, “go get me a job at IBM”. Working a virtual room is no different, says Liz Ryan, a columnist and author. “People believe networking is all about going to the universe with your problems and it’s not. It’s about human connections.”

6. So go make connections. Personalise every approach by talking about something that will be of interest to the respondent, Ryan says. Hopefully a real-world conversation and coffee will follow after a few such online encounters.

7. The rules. If you initiate the contact, the onus is on you to keep contributing the kind of valuable information that will build that relationship into a useful connection. “You don’t have to be right in your educated guess about what might be valuable... you just have to try. And it has to be sincere,” Ryan says.

8. Be aware of your audience. Recruiters and companies also look at these websites, says Alice Snell, the vice-president of Taleo Research, a talent management software provider. So think twice before you accept invitations to join other people’s networks. Are they people with whom you would like to be associated?

9. Be an earlier adopter. Keep an eye out for new opportunities to network, such as Second Life, in which companies are beginning to experiment, Snell says. “It demonstrates that you are tech savvy, you are interested, you are curious and sometimes you can get a jump ahead.”

10. Make time. The time you spend using these sites to their full potential will pay dividends, Snell says. Use them half-heartedly and it could send the wrong message.

More tips

Be polite. It’s better to let invitations from people you don’t know languish than reject connections, Liz Ryan says.
Use your space. You can paste a portfolio of your work, direct people to your own blog, or include links to organisations where you volunteer, for example, within your profile page, Alice Snell says.
Create a brand. If you’re on LinkedIn, write a personal tagline in the text space under your name that sums up who you are, Kevin Eyres says. You can use this tagline across all the sites and blogs that you use.
Find out more. Read Happy About Online Networking: The Virtually Simple Way to Build Professional Relationships, by Liz Ryan (Happy About, £12.95)

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