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This fun and power-packed guide will show you how to turn your online followers into real friends—this week. How to turn an online acquaintance into a real friend this week. If you’ve struggled to make new friends in adulthood, or you feel bewildered about how to make real friends online, this post is for you.

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In this guide, I’ll show you how to create real friendships from your dozens, hundreds, or thousands of existing online followers. TBH, this post could just as easily be titled “how to make friends on Instagram” but the advice applies no matter which social media network you spend most of your time on. My name is Kat Vellos and I’m a connection coach and the author of We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships. I’m also the creator and host of the platonic matchmaking event called Here to Make Friends. The first thing to acknowledge is that “online friends” can certainly be “real friends” too, but a lot of the time we mentally compartmentalize online friends as not-quite-real, because we haven’t interacted with them in the offline world. When we’re away from the internet, these people are not a part of our regular lives. These friendships live inside the computer, smartphone, or app and that’s it. You might call them virtual friends, online friends, digital friends, online acquaintances, or simply followers. We also know that offline interaction also isn’t enough to qualify someone as a real friend. You’ve no doubt interacted with plenty of people offline and face-to-face that you don’t consider to be your true friends. This list might include neighbors, coworkers, the people you see at the dog park or coffee shop, the parents of your kids’ classmates, and your fellow commuters. So let’s talk about what steps to take to turn “somebody you just know online” into “a real friend who’s part of both your online and offline life.” If you’ve been wanting to find friendship online, this is the guide you’ll want to save and refer back to. This guide to making new friends online includes: Scripts: These are sentences you can say to invite someone into the “real friend” or “offline friend” category without being awkward, creepy, or weird. Actions: There are things you need to do before and after initiating a friendship to make sure that your friendship succeeds. Grab a notebook or a sheet of paper, because you’re going to write down a few things. Do’s and don’ts: The best practices you want to do — and the pitfalls you want to avoid — to make sure that your new friendships flourish. What makes a good friendship. In my book, We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships , I lay out numerous characteristics that are typically present in a healthy friendship. These include things like compatibility/chemistry, complementary communication styles (not to be confused with ‘complimentary’ which is nice but not what I’m talking about here), shared values, openness, commitment, trust, reciprocity, and more. If you’ve already gotten a clear sense that you and a particular online acquaintance have a good amount of things in common and you want to level up your friendship, make a list of the things that make a friendship feel “real” to you . You might include things like: We can each talk about the good and bad things that are going on in our lives. We trust each other, and keep each other’s private information confidential. We can open up to each other about our fears, anxieties, things we don’t know, and mistakes. We share inspiring articles, books, and stories to support each other to learn, grow, and try new things. We celebrate our successes and accomplishments because we want to see each other succeed. + any other items that make a friendship feel real and fulfilling for you. Once you’ve got this list clear, knowing that you can always come back and adjust it, it’s time to start creating the runway for your new friendships to take flight. In the next section I’ll give you a shortcut to help you figure out if an online friendship is something that’s likely to grow wings and soar. Pre-flight checklist for taking your online friendship offline. ☑️ Do you feel welcome to reach out to this person directly? Based on your past interactions, do you get the sense that this person would be happy to hear from you? If you’ve gotten signals indicating that the other person wouldn’t or doesn’t welcome you in their DMs, then they’re probably not open to connecting offline either. But if they usually reply to your DMs with the kind of enthusiasm that shows that they’re open to hearing from you, then that’s a good sign that you might be able to develop a closer friendship. ☑️ Do you share info, links, replies, comments, DMs, and/or support with each other in balanced and mutually invested ways? Is there a back-n-forth to your online conversations, or is just one of you sharing and the other person is doing the bulk of the reading, listening, and responding? A step beyond that: Is one of you sharing and the other person is not responding at all? If that’s the case, you likely don’t have a good seed for offline friendship here. A better situation to build on is a connection where both of you have opened up to share stories, reflections, resources, jokes, and thoughts that are meaningful or vulnerable. Vulnerable doesn’t mean telling your deepest darkest secrets or filling someone’s DMs with pages and pages of text. That might freak someone out and scare your potential friend away. Vulnerable self-disclosure needs to take into account the depth of your relationship, and level up in stages. If the answer to both of the above questions is a clear and resounding YES, then you’re off to a great start. It sounds like you have a good seed for deeper friendship. Asking an online acquaintance to be your offline friend. The next step is to put some feelers out and see if your online acquaintance is open to connecting offline and/or being closer friends. There’s a pretty good chance that they also want to make friends online so they’ll be pumped to hear from you. Here are a few scripts of what your invitation could sound like. Feel free to modify these and put it in your own words, using examples from your real life obviously: “Whats up, Lex!