I'm starting the series off by looking at the core service, Networking.

TalkBizNow does not limit the number of contacts you can make on the site, you are simply able to search and connect with whomever you want, after all that's what Business Networking is all about, isn’t it?

So to start off you will notice a 'Quick search' at the top right of your screen.  From here you can quickly find 'People', 'Roles' and 'Companies'.  Try typing in 'Ollie Gash', he's one of our developers here and I'm sure he won’t mind you connecting with him!

You will be taken to the full search screen where you can see Ollie's profile pic and some info on the number of 'Contacts', 'Blogs', 'Webinars', 'Groups' and 'Adverts' he has.  There's also an 'Invite' option where you can send Ollie an invite to be your contact.  Nice and easy.

There is also an area just above the search results where you can see the 'Did you mean...' section.  Clicking here will show you some other possible results that sound like Ollie and Gash.  This is particularly useful if you are unsure of the spelling for the ‘Person’ or ‘Company’ but have an idea of what it sounds like.

On the search page you can see that you have some additional options to the left where you can search for a specific ‘Person’ within a ‘Role’ or in a ‘Company’ or for any of these individually.  We also give you a slider for the accuracy of the results, the less accurate; the more the ‘sounds like’ function will try and match your results.

There’s also the advanced search where you can really start to narrow down your results.  Just click the ‘See List’ link to drag and drop the areas you want to search on, these areas are loaded from our member’s profile information.

So that’s searching and connecting with a contact, lets jump to our ‘My workspace’ tab and have a look at one of the items on there, ‘Do you know...’ which is located inside the ‘My contacts’ window.  If you can’t see this on your workspace just look in the right hand menu under the ‘Networking’ section and drag the ‘My contacts’ item (with a green plus to the side of it indicating that you can add this to your workspace) onto your workspace.  Move it until you get an outline rectangle and then drop it in place.  You will see the ‘Do you know...’ item in this window and there will be a number in red.  This is the number of contacts we are suggesting that you may know based on a number of criteria, one of which is that they know someone you already know so it’s going to be pretty useful. 

Clicking on the number will take you through to your main ‘My contacts’ section of the site where you can see the suggested contacts and invite them directly, useful!

I’ll be adding to this shortly to tell you the other great ways of connecting to your contacts works on TalkBizNow, in the mean time if you have any questions, feel free to comment below.