Twitter: Follow Friday

If you've joined Twitter, or even if you haven't but you read it sometimes, you may have noticed a feature called Follow Friday. Basically, it's an easy way for people to recommend other people to follow on Twitter. You simply tweet the names of Twitter users you like and tag it with #followfriday or #FF.

The hashtag (#) symbol is important because it means it becomes a clickable link which makes it easy for everyone on Twitter to access.

Unfortunately, I've noticed that most people just tweet a long list of names of people they like which is easy to do, but has the unfortunate consequence of cluttering the Twitter stream up and it just becomes a very annoying form of spam.

A much better method (in my opinion) is to tweet just one Follow Friday at a time. It means you have space to provide details about why you are making the recommendation. Here's a few that I posted today, for example:

#FF @Directgov Information and practical advice about public services. http://direct.gov.uk Website of the UK government

#FF @suellewellyn "Journalist. Broadcaster. Communicator." for her informative and friendly tweets. Provides lots of useful links!

#FF @lynneguist An American linguist in England. Tweets about British and American English http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/

Now, I realize you wouldn't have time to use this method for everyone you want to recommend but you can post a few at a time, and then do some more on subsequent Fridays. It does take a bit more thought but I think it means more to the people you are recommending as well to people looking for new followers.

Another very easy way to do Follow Friday is to use your lists. You can tweet the link to a particular list and mark it as #FollowFriday. I've noticed more and more people doing it this way.

Are you on Twitter? What are your thoughts about Follow Friday?

These are my Twitter accounts:
http://twitter.com/ViewFromEngland
http://twitter.com/BookishMagpie