If you are on Twitter then you cannot miss the endless streams of names that get tweeted and re-tweeted on a Friday with the #FF hashtag. But how many of you ever click on the names and pay any attention to them? I have to admit that I now skip over and totally ignore them, and I would guess many of you do too.
Follow Friday Helper
I think the problem is that, rather than being a true recommendation of great people worth following, follow friday has become a habit or a tit for tat thing, especially with people using the Follow Friday Helper app so they can send them out without even thinking. You can use the app to send individual clarified follow friday recommendations too; but it seems that just too many people take the seemingly easy option.
Also, when you receive a follow friday recommendation, it is polite to thank the sender for mentioning you, but this is often done by a re-tweet where all those names in the list are again repeated. You have to look really carefully at your stream to see if you are suddenly very popular getting recommended again, or you have just been caught up in the thank you messages as a passenger!
I am not being all bah humbug about follow friday, as Twitter is after all a social media tool and all about making connections with people and sharing those tweeters who you really connect with, but if you give a reason why I should follow someone, I am far more likely to take a look at that Twitter account and perhaps add them to my own following list.
My ideal type of #FF
And when you say thank you to someone who has included you in a follow friday message – please just thank them personally and remove all the other Twitter names from the list so we don’t all get our feeds clogged with fake follow friday messages.
I would like to thank @PilgrimChris for being the inspiration to this post via his audio boo entitled No More #FF For Me! , and the follow up audio boo #FF – A Clarification. If you have not come across Audio boo before, it is a mobile and web platform for recording and sharing audio – and can be used like an audio blog.
Silicon Bullet Forever 