One of the most constructive things your business can do on social media is engage with fans and followers. Thanks to LinkedIn Contacts, a new tool launched by LinkedIn earlier this year, it has never been easier to keep in touch with the people that matter most – at least in the business world.

How it Works

This feature is designed to pull contacts from your address book, email accounts and calendars on Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and more, integrating them with your connections on LinkedIn. The contact management system is an efficient way to manage your relationships, and it offers a number of ways to organize your contacts.

Expanding Contact Relationships

LinkedIn Contacts is available on both LinkedIn.com and as an iPhone app. Since its launching in April, users have been referring to the tool as a “personal assistant,” helping them to keep track of contacts by pulling up recent conversations and notifying them of new job changes.

For instance, within each contact, you have an extended relationship view that combines all of the interactions you’ve had with a particular person over different networks. Also included are reminders that you have sent yourself to connect with the person in the future. Instead of having to manually update for past events, these dates are integrated into the timeline of events. This is a handy feature that will allow you to remember a few more things, even with a hectic calendar.

Other Noteworthy Features

There are other neat, practical features that you’ll enjoy with LinkedIn Contacts, such as:

  • A rotating photo carousel

  • Alerts on job changes

  • Birthday reminders

  • Option to add notes

  • Option to set reminders

  • Capacity to connect with third-party networks

  • Ability to add and tag people not in your LinkedIn network

  • View contacts by recent conversations, location, company, alphabetically or recently added

Now, we know what you’re thinking: Can Facebook and Twitter contacts be integrated with this new tool? No, at least for now. LinkedIn is focused on expanding professional relationships. Currently, LinkedIn is narrowing in on ways to make managing business relationships easier, not leverage new relationships in the workplace. In the future, there may be a separate tool for that. And for the site itself, they hope that with LinkedIn Contacts, users will be encouraged to visit the site more often and for longer periods of time.

Try out LinkedIn Contacts today and enjoy a better way of staying in touch, LinkedIn style.