RE-TWEET IT!
Tweet
On Twitter, an interesting, entertaining and extremely useful ritual takes place every week on Friday.
FOLLOW FRIDAY is a chance for you to recommend other people on Twitter that you think merit being followed – for any reason at all.
The result is often a mish-mash of suggestions. Some folks are cryptic, just listing user names with a ‘#FollowFriday’ hashtag to indicate it’s their recommendation list. Others tweet over and over, sharing long lists.
To enhance the value of your recommendation to others on your tweet-stream, I propose a ‘protocol’ for Follow Friday recommendations.
The core principle behind this protocol would be “Less is More”. After all, the real value in your #FollowFriday suggestion is to recommend the cream of the crop!
Each Follow Friday tweet should contain the following data:
1. Who do you recommend? The name or username of the person you are recommending on Follow Friday.
2. Why? Is the person your best friend? Or make you laugh? Or share wonderful links? Or a celebrity, rockstar, great guy/gal? Tell us. It helps us decide.
3. Who (in your opinion) would most benefit from following them? No matter how talented or special someone is, not everyone needs to follow them. So tell us which kind/group of people YOU believe will most benefit from following your recommended star. Writers? Marketers? Entrepreneurs? House-wives? Hobbyists? Tell.
4. Limit to 1 or 2 recommendation/tweet. Yes, it’s more work for you. But then, if you won’t take the extra half-minute to recommend that person, why would I want to invest 5 or more minutes to follow them and read their updates? See?
Of course, tweet as many Follow Friday recos as you feel comfortable with. But for each, include the 4 ‘decision making’ points above.
Here are a few samples:
Thoughts?
{ 4 comments }
Absolutely Dr Mani,
I use to list 6, 7 or even 8 usernames and simply say #followfriday – not good enough! I’ve learned that by giving reasons for your recommendations you’re adding real value to your tweets.
Having said that, I do however have my doubts as to the real worth of #followfriday. Do people really check the hashtag search and browse for folk to follow? If they don’t then why not simply tweet about recommendations throughout the week?
Peter
Excellent advice. I’m one of the ones who does look at the recommendations of my best connections, and then often wonder what they were thinking to recommend someone who only tweets nonsensical responses to boring questions. If we tweet only those who give good solid information and links, or those who can make us laugh in 140 characters, we’ll be doing the Twitter community a great favor.
Patricia
http://patriciastoltey.blogspot.com
For a long time I hesitated to post any follow Friday recommendations because I didn’t want to post just a list of names, but 140 characters isn’t always enough to tell why you think others would enjoy someone.
After trying a couple different ways of sharing (post a category (ie comedian, social media pro, or marketer) and share a couple names, or a short description of one person, I finally came up with a solution.
I write a short post mentioning 3 or 4 people and telling why I recommend them. For each person, I limit myself to a paragraph around the length of a tweet although I haven’t actually counted the number of characters.
Then I share the names, a quick hint as to why I’m suggesting them, and a link to the blog post.
One benefit is that anyone who wants to know more can easily ask, or mention their own recommendation for the person without worrying about the space to retweet and comment.
Love it! Another unique and positive idea.
Regards,
Dan
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