4 Ways Of Making Good Friendships Online
Being in Coventry, United Kingdom, means I do not get as many startup events as in cities like London. Hence, I seldom meet people beyond my school mates in University of Warwick.
However, I don’t let this limit me from making new like-minded friends, especially those who are interested in startups. Thanks to the Internet, it has become so easy to connect with others online.
Note: This is my advice on making genuine friendships and not networking and knowing as many people as possible. In fact, I would recommend the opposite — make as little friends as possible at the same time. I would rather have 5 close and genuine friends than 500 acquaintances. I would only think about expanding the circle after the 5 new friends have become close friends, without compromising the existing friendships by too much.
Value Of Making Friends Online
If, like me, you are living in a remote area or your city does not have much startup activities, being able to make friends online would be very helpful. The best outcome is the genuine friendships you create.
For me, making friends online has brought me several benefits.
The first and most important benefit is simply the joy of having a close friend:
- Someone whom I can talk to, share ideas with and possibly hangout with
- Someone whom I can help and support
- Someone whom I can ask for advice, suggestions or help
Also, these friends constantly inspire me with the things they do. And as an added bonus, some friends have helped me to open doors to wonderful opportunities that I could only imagine previously.
Please do not make friends just for the potential benefits they could bring to you (such as connections). That’s just making use of them! And that’s not what friends are for!
4 Ways To Make Genuine Friends Online
As I have benefited from making friends online, I would like to share the 4 ways I adopt to make genuine friends online.
Note: Friendship is a 2 way thing. If the other person does not reciprocate the interest to be friends, please don’t force it.
1. Twitter
Twitter is my favourite channel out of these 4 that I am recommending. Most of the friends I’ve made recently were through Twitter.
Okay, how I use Twitter to make friends is slightly cheeky as it isn’t entirely online only.
What I normally do is after they know me on Twitter (read: are aware that I exist via Twitter), I would ask to meet them for coffee if I can travel to their place to meet them.
Here’s examples of how I got to know Kosta Mavroulakis:
and Thomas Dunn:
While it is not a must, I found that meeting them in real life really helps with strengthening the friendship.
I feel that being willing to travel to where they are based shows my sincerity to know them. Also, if they are offering their time to meet me, the least I could do is to travel over to meet them.
Of course, it’s not always possible to meet them in real life. They might be living in another country or a city far away from yours. I’m lucky that my house is an hour to two hours train ride away from London where many startup people live.
For this, I could think of 2 possible resolutions:
- Choose people who lives near you or in places where you could easily travel to. I would love to meet the Buffer team and startup people like Ryan Hoover but I know I cannot afford to travel to their place to meet them.
- Skype (or other forms of chat). Twitter might not be the best place for a chit-chat and meaningful conversations due to the 140 character limit. While it would not be as close as face-to-face meeting, moving to a messaging platform allows deeper conversations. When I first got to know Thomas Dunn, we started with chatting on Skype.
Other amazing people I’ve gotten to know through Twitter recently are Lucas Gordon, Keefy Yap and Dave Chapman. (Come and say hello AFTER you read this article :P)
2. Online Chats
The second way I would recommend is to participate in online chats.
2 main forms of online chats that I participate in are Twitter chats and Slack chats. For Twitter chats, it’s mainly #bufferchat and for Slack chats, I’m in #startup and Support Driven Chat.
There is also #nomad Slack chat but I was too slow in signing up for it and I can’t afford to pay the membership fee they are charging now. You could also check out Slack Chats, a place to discover and join private Slack groups, to find Slack chats that interest you.
A downside to these chat is the pace and volume of messages. For me, I find it quite hard to keep up with the conversations, especially when a lot of people are chatting at the same time.
Fortunately, I could tweet people directly and send private messages via Slack. When I find interesting people that I would like to connect with, I would approach them using these 2 methods. This is because I prefer getting to know someone better through one-to-one chat than through mass group conversations.
3. Emails/Volunteering
The third way is the old school method of emailing people whom I love to connect with.
I included volunteering as part of this method because all of the time when I emailed someone, it was because I wanted to offer my help. It usually started with me wanting to help the other person. And through helping them, we became friends.
One example is me volunteering to help Rodolphe with community management of Remotive. I’m not sure if we are at the stage of being close friends per se as we have only been chatting for a few weeks. However, I would really love to get to know him better eventually as he is an really interesting person!☺(Note: I’ve not met Rodolphe in real life.)
A disadvantage of using emails is that you might not know the other person’s email address. I use tools like Rapportive and Full Contact to help me. I discovered another tool recently called Anymail Finder. Here’s a way to find out people’s email address.
Another disadvantage is that your email might be buried under other emails that they receive. This is understandable. Hence, I would usually send a follow up email a few days later.
If I still do not receive any replies after the second email, I might send a third one a week or two weeks later. There might be a chance that the other person is not interested to connect with me and if I could sense that, I would stop.
A possible resolution is to reach out to them via other channels such as Twitter or Instagram.
It is up to individuals how persistent they want to be. If you want to be very persistent, I would recommend that you be polite with it and not annoy the other person. The last thing you want from trying to make a friend is to make the other person dislike you 😂.
Other wonderful friends whom I’ve made through this method are Salim Virani, Ben Aldred, Kumaran Veluppillai and (only very recently) Chase Clemons.
4. Online Communities/Forums
The last way is through online communities and forums. I’m not really good at this yet and it’s something I would like to work on.
The few online communities that I visit are Product Hunt, Growth Hackers and Inbound.org. As I do not visit and participate in them very regularly, I find it much harder to make any friendship through them. Also, I don’t want to be using these platforms to make friends without making much contribution to them.
One good aspect of such online communities is that the pace of conversations is much slower than that on Slack chats, though the volume can be quite high too. Nevertheless, it is easier to join the conversations.
However, you cannot private message anyone via the platforms at the moment. So you would need to find other avenues to reach out to them. My preferred choice is Twitter.
Maintaining The Bond
All good friendships require maintenance. The way you choose to maintain your friendships is really up to you. Different people have different ways of doing this.
For me, I feel that the basics of maintaining friendships offline apply to that online as well:
- I want to have regular contact with my friends. So every now and then, I would chat with them and see how they are doing. (Or stalk them on Facebook and Twitter 🙊)
- I know that I can depend on my friends when I need help so when they need help, I would try my best too.
- I find that meet up in real life and shared experiences really strengthen friendships. So I would want to meet up with them whenever possible.
I wouldn’t say that I’m good at this and I would really want to improve how I maintain my friendships.
Conclusion
Being in a remote city does not mean that we cannot get to know like-minded people. Most of my like-minded friends do not live in the same city as me. Because of the Internet, it is a lot easier to “meet” people online.
The 4 ways I would recommend to make like-minded friends online are:
- Online Chats
- Emailing/Volunteering
- Online Communities/Forums
Do you know of any other ways to make like-minded friends online? I would love to know them.
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