Have you ever heard the saying, “Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver, the other is gold”? That’s a perfect description of a successful online networking philosophy.

When you get to the point where you are following thousands of people, or friending thousands of people, it gets hard to keep track of all of the people you’re communicating with. And let’s face it, a LARGE percentage of your “audience” doesn’t even exist, for all practical purposes. They created an account months or years ago and never check in any more, or they’re spambots, or they are real humans who act like spambots by only tweeting links and never responding…

So that makes the real people who take time out of their day to correspond with you that much more precious, in terms of networking.

One way to make sure that you keep track of all of the people that you have made a connection with  is to use an application like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, and create a couple of streams that you especially want to keep track of – like “industry leaders” and “connections”. And every single time someone communicates with you on a social networking site, add them to that list.

Another thing that I do is, I cut and paste the Twitter handle, facebook name, linkedin name, etc. of people I want to stay in touch with into a document, and I regularly go through that list and check up on what those people are up to, and I check in with them. I may just tweet a simple hello, I may comment on something they just said, but if I’ve already established a connection with someone, I don’t want to let it go. This type of list can, and should, include any industry superstars that you’ve been lucky enough to connect with, AND people who are up and coming in your industry, and  people who have retweeted your stuff or answered a question or responded to a tweet.

I don’t need to tell you how valuable networking is to your bottom line. I frequently send hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of business to talented friends of mine – people that I met online – and I’ve gotten tens of thousands of dollars in new business by having people refer business to me, and refer others to my info-products.

So remember to treat your “stay in touch” list as the priceless business resource that it is, and use it frequently!