What Is Social Capital And How Can You Use It?

Organisations such as Facebook, Airbnb and Uber have harnessed social capital to grow their market shares and become major disruptive forces in their industries. So lets find out how we can build and enhance social capital for ourselves.

Define Social Capital:

Social capital is a connection multiple people have between each other. These connections can be very beneficial. Say you're wanting to start a business, you'd start talking to some contacts like your friends or your work colleagues to see if it's a good idea or how you can work together, they could potentially be your first customer. Another concept you can use to define social capital is your social network. Your social network is made up the people you know and the relationships you have between them, the size of your network is totally dependent on you. This network will allow you to evaluate the resources you can access from these people. The quality of the relationship will determine the depths of resources you can access from these people.

How can you build and enhance your social capital:

Go out there and meet people! The more connections you have the better access to resources you have. Simply talking to a person about your life style,work or passions is very effective. You both can evaluate what you need from each other and how you can relate. Being active on social media plays an important role too. Get involved in social media groups. Social media groups gives you access to people who think the similarly to you and is a place where you can share your vision and ideas. They're many websites like Linkedin, where you can connect with people and learn from them or organize to work together. Its important to display as much information about your self to other people, so they can really understand who are and figure out how you could build a connection together, because as I said before social capital is a connection.

References:

Tristan, C. 2004. Definitions of Social Capital. Social Capital Research. [online]. Available at: http://www.socialcapitalresearch.com/literature/definition.html [Accessed 23 April 2017].

Picture By: George Heginbotham