How to stay in touch with your network without being fake

A lot of people avoid reaching out to their own network not because they don't care, but because they're worried it will read as fake: that texting someone out of nowhere looks like you want something, even when you don't.

That worry is usually solvable. What makes outreach feel transactional isn't the act of reaching out. It's the shape of the message.

Three things give it away: it could have been sent to anyone, it arrives suspiciously close to when you need something from that person, and it asks for something before it has said anything real. Any one of those is enough to make a genuine message read as an angle.

None of those are about frequency or timing on their own: a message after two years can feel completely genuine, and a message after two weeks can feel completely hollow. It's the content, not the clock.

A specific reference does almost all the work. 'Saw you opened the new studio, congrats' could only have been written to that one person. It proves you were paying attention without requiring you to say so.

The second piece is not needing anything back. A message that just says something true and asks for nothing gives the other person room to reply whenever, however, or not at all, which paradoxically makes them more likely to want to.

"Just checking in" is the one to watch for. It names the act of reaching out instead of actually reaching out: it tells someone you are performing the gesture of staying in touch rather than just doing it. Replace it with the specific thing that made you think of them, and the message stops sounding like a task you were completing.

Apologising for the gap has the same problem in a different shape. 'Sorry it's been so long' puts the burden on the other person to reassure you it's fine, before the conversation has even started. Writing as if the conversation never really stopped works better, because for people who actually matter to you, it usually hasn't.

The short version

Specific beats generic, no ask beats an ask, and "I thought of you because" beats "just checking in" every time. Outreach feels fake when it could have been sent to anyone; it feels real when it obviously couldn't have been.