Everyone who has used Twitter for more than a couple weeks has surely seen, and likely participated in, #followfriday — Don’t! The once productive and effective way to recommend to people to follow has turned into an unsustainable self promotional orgy that is clogging the arteries of twitter. Although this has been percolating in my mind for some time, Seth Simonds opened my eyes with his blog post, Out With #FollowFriday, In With Connected Communities
As Seth points out, one of the problems with #followfriday is that so many people recommend others for the sheer goal of receiving a reciprocal recommendation, I’m guilty! This has resulted in a significant increase in number of #followfriday tweets, as well as, a great deterioration in their quality. #followfriday recommendations now compete with each other and it has become very difficult to identify recommendations that would bring value to your twitter experience. In effect, what once helped us increase the quality of our networks has become a tool to simply increase the quantity of followers. People add as many as then can regardless of the effect upon the greater experience, as if the quantity of followers signifies their importance. Well, I tell you it does not. It also does not signify your ability to mobilize your network to achieve any specific result. The key to both these things is building a network of quality followers who engage and take action for things in which they believe. I guarantee taking this approach will provide you with a richer more manageable Twitter experience and allow you to provide more value to your followers.
I will take the following approach to recommending people that I believe will add value: I will tweet whenever I interact with an individual that adds significant value and tell my followers why. I will use #rec as the hashtag and will not recommend more than one person per tweet. I will also try not to recommend more than three people per day. This will ensure the quality of my recommendations.
I hope that others will adopt a similar approach and share this with others so we can all build more sustainable high quality experiences and interactions. If you like this approach, tweet about it so others will know. You can also tweet with me @andrewmueller about this.
I have always held that Follow Friday is a bad idea. It starts every week on Wednesday and spills into Wednesday of the next week. It is one more scam to amass followers, albeit a low grade scam compared to some. It generates too much noise and is devoid of useful information. The most disingenuous aspect of this all is the Follow Friday thank you with hashtag included which, imagine that, allows one to recommend oneself! Follow Friday, RT madness, @aplusk are just some of the many reasons Twitter is becoming irrelevant for so many people. http://is.gd/sGXV
Hello Carl, I can appreciate your point of view. Twitter is definitely what you make of it and is different for different people. One thing that I would like to point out is that Twitter is a platform while #followfriday content. My main point is that the current way that the majority of people are using #followfriday is creating a deluge of content that is useful for those that want to collect as many followers as possible, but has rendered #followfriday nearly useless for those looking to create more selective networks. I am suggesting an alternate method that may be more useful for that second group.
In fact, I am sure that if #rec catches on, people will also use that how they see fit and not necessarily how I suggested in my post.
Sounds like a plan, bro! You can count on me and many others to check out the people you suggest.
Seth
My concern hasn’t been so much the gratuitous self-promotion but the social obligation not to forget to mention all the people you appreciate. And yes, the volumes.
I am taking @Carl_Ingalls’ suggestion to heart: Don’t simply list a bunch of usernames, but recommend one person, and explain why. He makes the distinction between a bulk mention and a thoughtful recommendation. The latter I do appreciate, because it has helped me find some great people. Admittedly, this signal-rich approach can work perfectly fine without the #followfriday hashtag being included at all.
I must admit that in the past I have been able to find some great people to follow through #followfriday tweets, but lately this has gotten harder and harder.
The problem is one of efficiency. A search for #followfriday would reveal thousands, maybe tens of thousands of tweets, each containing simply a list of names. No descriptive information is included. To determine whether any would be of interest I would have to click each name, wait for a page to come up, and then examine the profile and tweets to determine whether the person would likely add value to my twitter experience. To my knowledge it is impossible to filter the results for tweets that contain descriptive information.
For me, and I suspect others, it would be tremendously more efficient to have contextual information by the person making the recommendation. This would allow me to only click on those that I would be likely to add based on the context of the recommendation.
I suggested to use the hashtag #rec,and to make recommendation throughout the week. This would allow people to search #rec anytime and not have to wait until fridays. Granted I nor anyone else is in control of how people ultimately use this hashtag. I can only hope that it helps to add value the experience of those who do.
Thank you for this insight, Andrew. I felt that I was failing in some way by not using this Friday stuff, and now I feel that I don’t have to. Much relieved.
I would be more likely to use your #rec hashtag in a search if I found that your #rec tweets typically were valuable. Even then, I think I would do an advanced search and search only for #rec tweets by @username.
But yes, each user will make their own usage “rules.”
Twitter is what you make of it, and the same thing is true of FollowFriday. For some people, Twitter is all about collecting followers, and they will use any recommendation system toward that end, including Andrew Mueller’s #rec system. Other people use Twitter for other purposes, and they use FollowFriday to suit those purposes.
It is easy to distinguish between the different uses of FollowFriday (and of Twitter). Pick the ones you want, and ignore the rest.
Your observation is that #FollowFriday is “nearly useless for those looking to create more selective networks”. Yet my own observation is that #FollowFriday is extremely useful for that specific purpose. Perhaps our different views may reflect the fact that we each have created our own experience within Twitter.
I see two styles of #FollowFriday. One is when a username is merely mentioned in the same tweet as the #FollowFriday hashtag, sometimes with a list of other usernames, and I call this a “Mention”. The other is when an explanation is included as to why the tweeter is recommending the person or persons, and I call this a “Recommendation”. If my username appears in a #FollowFriday tweet, I usually thank the tweeter either for a “FollowFriday Mention” or a “FollowFriday Recommendation”.
However, I only use real recommendations for finding people that I might consider following, and I never have any difficulty finding them. A great example of a great series of real FollowFriday Recommendations was @timhurson on Fri 1 May 2009.
Davd,
I am glad you reached this conclusion and others are coming to the same conclusion. Unfortunately, we won’t bring about much change without a coordinated effort.
I appreciate that you took the time to comment. :^)
David’s ’suggestion style’ comment brings one other important thing to mind.
I neglected to mention in my previous comment that after being ‘taken to the woodshed’ by my friend for my #followfriday flood this past week, I had even more hot coals dumped on my head by someone who instead of taking me to task, showed me how it was done, using that same “I follow AJ in Nashville because…” format. She proceeded to say some very nice things, in a single tweet which I of course appreciated, but again caused me to realize, “y’see, dummy? THIS is how you recommend someone for #followfriday!”
And it was that example, more than being bawled out that showed me the error of my ways.
Thanks again for providing this great forum, Andrew, and to David for jogging my memory!
At first i was not a fan of #ff,seeing it only as a way of promoting self.However recently there has been a drive to broaden #ff by encouraging users to outline the reasons why others are recommended.I use this system and find it compliments those i follow.As twitter develops and evolves there are going to be changes in style as well as content plus, new avenues to explore so why not include #rec and tweeters can then chose.Kind Regards Bea.
Scott, Wow thanks for sharing that! Seems like you have been thinking about this issue and a solution for quite some time. I think you may have identified a kernel of a potential sustainable solution for follow recommendations. I need to carefully think about what you are saying here and the practicality of its use among the greater twitter community. I look forward to discussing this further.
I encourage every one who reads this post to read your comment and give feeedback.
Thanks
My eyes ususally glaze over when I see a list of usernames in a followfriday tweet. I always use the “I suggest you follow x because…” format because I think my followers are going to need a *reason* to follow someone I suggest.
I hadn’t seen anyone else use that type of format before I decided on it but I’m not surpised that other people are having the same idea.
(Sorry for double post, my correct URL is in this one)
I find that I look for follow fridays by people in my industries and I read each profile before I follow.
I rec those that offer some special insights to me.
Haven’t had an issue.
That is great AJ, showing the way is very useful to both check in for yourself and to demonstrate to others. In fact I did much of the same. Carl Ingalls, one of the first to comment on this post, challenged my assumptions and was really beneficial to my premise. I thanked him with a sincere #rec tweet. In doing so I realized that recommendation tweets about a single person that includes context are so much more gratifying to send.
I find it remarkably poignant that there would be so much discussion this weekend following the #followfriday in which I, for the first time, decided to go with the all out flood approach. I honestly thought it was the right thing to do mostly because it seemed everyone else (including established members of the community) did it too.
I was shocked immediately afterward to find myself being soundly criticized by one of my better Twitter acquaintances, whom I respect tremendously. I truly felt as though I’d been taken to the proverbial woodshed.
I learned my lesson, and appreciate your suggestion of this alternative approach, Andrew. I’m definitely going to give it a try.
That’s fair re experience. Am curious: there is a view gaining traction that says the fact someone is being followed means that the recommendation is inherent, e.g. follow any whom I follow as the fact I follow them says it all.
Any thoughts?
Nathan, very good points and you are absolutely correct, much of the value in twitter lies in the subjects being discussed. Some of the third party recommendation sites like Wefollow all you to categorize yourself as to what you tweet about. This said, it can be and probably is misused since anyone can claim anything. There is no real verification. That is one reason recommendations with context could be so valuable, it is a third party recommending and telling why.
Often I will say something like “for his expertise in communications, I recommend x and include the #rec hashtag. If this becomes a widely used format, you could run a twitter search for “#rec + communications” and see everyone recommended for communications. I think it could help people find others to follow based on peer recommendations around a subject matter.
Thanks for bringing this up
Khayyam, I am glad that you took the time to comment. I hear what you are saying that #followfriday now functions like spam. Not sure if it started that way or just ended up that way. Regardless, innocent spam is now created by new tweeps that take #followfriday at face value and just see the laundry lists that people are creating and retweeting. I was hoping to give them a better way of recommending people and at the same time realize that by providing value they will get better recommendations and build stronger, more interactive, and responsive networks.
As for Mr. Tweet, well it seems that no one uses that poor fellow. I think that the method for follow recommendations needs to be built into the workflow. Many people do not want to be troubled to go to another site in order to figure out who to follow. One consideration as to who to follow should be who made the recommendation; that says a lot.
Hope that this catches on and we can open enough eyes to the #followfriday game to build a critical mass for change.
If people used followfriday the way you are proposing we use #rec, it would be a wonderful thing. I’ve started avoiding the whole thing, even avoiding Twitter on Friday. I do my recommendations the rest of the week, one person at a time, and explaining why they are worth following. I hope your idea catches on.
Hi – good article. Appreciate FF’s spammy aspect, and single recs work in theory, but suspect that many don’t take the time to do that (maybe because it’s not feasible to do so).
The spam element could be controlled by filtering out FF tweets via the Twitter client, but if the idea is to get people to ‘agree’ on ‘rules’ re this convention or others, then that’s a slippery slope which may impact Twitter’s flexibility.
Think it’s important to remember that Twitter is all about feed subscription; if you experience a feed that gives you grief, you can always ‘unfollow’. I do this with follows who abuse the automated Direct Message service, and yes it impacts my follow numbers, but as I don’t care (in fact I don’t want more than 5K followers), it’s not an issue. If people just unfollowed the offending feeds, people would get the message soon enough.
I have used #followfriday in the past. Like other newbies, I posted a few tweets that included more than one @ name and did not give the reasons for the recommendations. But, then, I grasped the concept and started using that hashtag to recommend one person per tweet along with a reason to follow that person. I am willing to try the #rec tag in the future, not limiting myself to Friday. Great post.
I think it would be interesting to think of ways to categorize recommendations. People come to twitter with multiple aims, and different types of recommendations are necessary to satisfy those aims. I think that we on the verge of a more meta-data driven type of micro-blogging. Personally, following people is not as interesting to me as following subject matter. If you go to http://twitter.com/PureCognition, however you will see WHO I follow, but not WHAT I follow. For instance, what twitter searches have I saved into feeds?
Andrew, thank you for posting this conversation. I have lost control of my FF recommendations. I have my own way of following people and seldom use the FF recommendations but I use FF as a way to acknowledge the people who interact with me over the last week. As the number of people who interact with me has increased my FF recommendations have taken up more time than I thought possible. This last week I used Twitwall to list the entire group while listing the top 30 directly. The list of nearly 1300 would have taken all day and consumed enough bandwidth to feed a small country. There are no uninteresting people on Twitter and everyone at some level deserves a nomination. The other challenge, for me at least, is how to acknowledge all the RT’s every day. It was not difficult until somewhere around 15,000 followers. I have not come to a conclusion with any of this. I like the #rec less than 3 a day. Spontaneity is more important than the number however. I look forward to where this conversation leads.
Two things…
First… have a look see at what I think of the biggest spam campaign initiated by “influential” people as a game. As a game?! Not a system of recommendation? By definition alone it’s wrong and requires someone to be one top. I get it, it’s like high school prom. Please see: http://bit.ly/1cpTZg
Secondly… What ever happened to Mr. Tweet?! Isn’t that the ultimate way of recommending someone with a reason, which is easily searchable and actually takes effort to champion those who deserve it? #imjustsayin
Those were my two cents and now I’ve used them up. Make sure you spend yours wisely and don’t forget to vote for your Prom King and Queen every Friday.
Be there or be someone with some integrity.
p.s. http://twitterisnotacompetition.com
Andrew,
I do agree that #followfriday is an evolutionary step towards a more robust endorsement system. I do believe that it was a necessary step … to create the momentum, and also expose the various “downsides” of the meme.
When I created TopFollowFriday.com, I did so upon reading the tweet by @jowyang asking how someone could ever track the #followfriday tweets, and know who the highly recommended people were. Although I knew that people might eventually game the system, I went ahead and built the site for two purposes:
1. To provide a resource for visualizing the network of endorsements that were being made.
2. To explore how to improve the overall endorsement system to add value to twitter.
I have to admit that I was caught off guard by the shear number of people that began to game the system … using the tweets to simple get a rank on a website. I also know that the Internet is simply a reflection of the real world, and sadly there are the same people doing the same things in the real world for the same reasons.
Over the last month+ I have been slowly evolving TopFollowFriday.com to alter the “game”, and also to begin to move the data set that I have gathered into a more useful setting.
First … I don’t believe that this has anything to do with “Friday”. So I have a few new domains that I’m considering to use to make this much more about expertise or skills. My site already runs 24×7 so I’ve already moved beyond Friday. Acknowledgement of people is something that happens all of the time.
Second … I started to add more cost to the people wanting to game the system. I believe that as I continue to do this, and leverage the patterns of data that I have accumulated, I’ll be able to reduce the spammers by their own behaviors. I added the “daily” reset so that people like @aplusk don’t simply dominate by shear volume. I then added a difference between “re-endorsements” vs. “new endorsements”. Re-endorsements don’t count on the daily numbers. I’ve now chose to filter re-tweets. Only specific tweets are being counted. This is a start … not the end of where I want to go.
Third … I’ve been exploring various ratios that can be used to identify the “spammers” … people spamming their closest 5000 friends to get a few endorsements back. (Yeah … like they really can endorse the value of 5000 people?) As I look to enable these ratios, they can be used to reduce the visibility of people who have chosen to endorse simply to be endorsed back. I believe there is then a next step … a form of people-rank – where I can roll up your own “rank” and have it also reflect the aggregate rank of the people who endorse you.
Lastly … I’m looking for suggestions on a good syntax to use to more specifically endorse someone in a way that can be parsed. Not just simply saying that I want to endorse @bob … but why! What are the skills or expertise that @bob has that would make him interesting to others. This is where moving to another hashtag isn’t enough … it’s using the momentum that has been created to educate the twittersphere about a new syntax to use …
#rec @bob #painter He does amazing watercolors
This is an example of where the format would force certain syntaqx, but be less ambiguous, and allow for indexing of the tweets.
1. The message must start with #rec
2. The message then has one or more users with @
3. The message has one or more #tags to be assigned to those people
4. There is then optional text.
Currently, if there is no #tagged content, then the only option is to index all words … and so human language trips us up!
My goal would be to provide a crowd-sourced directory where we could search by location, and skills/expertise … and find valuable people.
I don’t believe that we’ll ever get rid of people trying to game the systems … look at Google. We now call gaming Google a really nice sounding term – SEO and SEM. (Or is that gaming humans?)
I do believe there are ways to evolve the systems that are growing around twitter to begin to leverage it to create extremely powerful communities!
Just some thoughts …
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I can certainly appreciate your point of view, In fact, I used #followfriday much the same way as you until last week (I stopped in the middle of Friday immediately after I read Seth Simmonds post). One problem however, unless you really know the list creator, you have know way of determining if they just created a random list or there is a “method to the madness”.. All in all, my intention was encourage thought about what kind of experience you are looking for on twitter and how to use #followfriday to encourage that type of experience. It seems that your have taken considerable time to think and comment about this, as have many others, and I hope that you have gleaned insights that bring value.
A few things to keep in mind:
I suggest that people do not wait until Fridays to make recommendations, but do so immediately upon the realization that someone is worthy of a recommendation – spontaneous recommendations throughout the week.
I chose three #rec/day for myself but that is just an example and not significant feature
I suggested an alternative tag #rec so people could filter tweets with context from those that were simply lists
Thanks again
Andy, Yes tag misuse will happen and all tags are subject to it. I recently read an article about some folks infiltrating the conservatives conversation by simply adding the #tcot tag to their posts and were able to disrupt or contribute Non-conservative views into the stream. The #rec tag is similarly vulnerable to such misuse (deliberate or not). I can see how the #ff2 tag would be perhaps a little more vulnerable to abuse because of its association to both #ff and #followfriday. People see the tag used with #followfriday tag posts and do not know how it differs, and they just start using it. That is why I chose a tag that would not have any similarity to the #followfriday tag. That said, if people start using the #rec with #followfriday tag it would likely be subject to the same misuse. I have not seen this happen yet.
The important part of this whole endeavor is to raise awareness as to the issue. I know it could be a lot of work but the misuse of the tag is actually an opportunity to raise awareness. Responding respectfully and politely to those who misuse the tag with a link to a post as to its intended use would not only be seen by them but by others. Something like ” I see you used the FF2 tag, did you know that it was intended to just thought you might like to know”
Thanks for building community on Twitter.
Andrew
Hello Heidi, You say you see my point but I am not sure that you really do. I am not trying to change how followfriday is currently being used. Actually, I don’t think anyone can. What I am trying to do is give people who are interested in building more selective communities an efficient method to both recommend people, and evaluate the recommendations, to see if they fit within there own follow selection criteria. My point is about community building recommendations.
My view is the whole purpose of recommending someone is to let YOUR network know that YOU recommend someone. The idea is to more easily be able to follow those people who will bring value to your twitter experience. It is about creating community and not about collecting as many followers as possible, the latter seems to be current predominant focus of followfriday. I believe that my followers are interested in my recommendations in part because I recommended them, and in part because of the reason why.
You may not realize that RT’ing of #followfriday posts is looked at by many as spam. What good is a second hand recommendation? In the end, followfriday is what it is and we all have our own reasons for using Twitter. If followfriday serves your needs and the needs of your followers, then by all means keep doing what you are doing. I would suggest just one thing, try recommending someone using the method I describe– one person with a reason why– and see how it feels to you, to them, and if you can to your followers. I can tell you it feels really good when I recommend someone like that. Besides it is not either or, #followfriday and #rec are useful at different times for different reasons.
Great topic for a Thursday night! My thoughts on FF:
1) When we used to try to figure out how to reward our sales force, there was always the discussion of “if we reward too many it’s watered down” vs. “if we reward only one we don’t recognize the contributions of perhaps rising stars or improving newbies.” In the end our conclusion was to find as many ways as possible to recognize people. They might not all be in the Top 5 for new clients added, but you can always find other reasons. Recognition is priority #1.
2) I think that as human beings we all want to feel like we matter, like somebody’s listening to what we say or cares about what we think. On Twitter it’s the same, you have this river rushing past and is anyone listening? So I like to recognize people who have interacted with me during the week, either with conversation, photos or retweets, and I recommend them to others because I think others will enjoy that sort of interaction as well.
3) On the topic of “one person per recommendation” vs. “a group of people per rec”, I don’t know. For instance if your style is to recognize people who engaged you during the week, and let’s say you have a list of 50 people, should one make 50 separate tweets, each saying “you’ll like @tweeter because they’re responsive and fun to talk to”, so that you have:
“you’ll like @tweeter1 because they’re responsive and fun to talk to”
“you’ll like @tweeter2 because they’re responsive and fun to talk to”
“you’ll like @tweeter3 because they’re responsive and fun to talk to”
and so forth?
Or is it better to let your network know that you like to recognize people on Friday who you’ve engaged with during the week, and make maybe 5 posts, rather than 50 posts, like:
“Great picks @tweeter1 @tweeter2 @tweeter3″
and everyone knows hey cool, these people are active in their network and I might want to follow them.
4) Of course the other question raised above is “how many people should one recommend on a Friday, perhaps 50 is too many” — which to me is a little like suggesting maybe how fast somebody should read, or how many pages they should read before they go to bed (“3 pages and it’s lights out, no more and no less”), or how much peanut butter goes on the sandwich.
One size does not fit all. Everyone uses social media for different reasons, everyone has different expectations. The idea that 3 is correct, or 1, or 20…well, who really knows, save for the one who is making the recommendations? In my mind, it is for each person to decide. And to me, it makes no difference how they decide, the fact that they are active and participating is great.
5) So for me, I don’t feel like there’s a right way or a wrong way to handle ff. If someone is pumping too much info through my stream, Twitter makes it easy to unfollow. (I mean, if someone’s just grabbing a list of their followers, one by one, that is quite spammy, and I’m sure that happens, but I just ignore it and go on, or unfol.)
But giving recognition, even if it’s only a mention of their name along with 10 others in a tweet, has never bothered me. I’m fine with those who want to dig deep and go 140 about just one person each week…that’s very cool, I always enjoy those, and I’m also fine with those who want to recognize as many people as they can, esp if there’s a method to the madness. If I know a user is rec’ing ppl who engaged him during the week, you can bet I’m gonna be clickin on his picks!
Wow I’ve typed too much, gotta go read and hit the sack…and there’s no telling how many pages I might read! J
Tks for the interaction!
Great ideas – love the idea of the #rec hashtag and making recommendations in the moment they occur to you.
For me it is ok to post a short list as long as there is sufficient context for why you recommend following them but agree that one per tweet is a far richer and more personal recommendation. It also accomplishes one key thing for me – it also another way to appreciate the people who contribute to me.
Thanks for inviting me to your post!
Andrew: I like the #rec anytime idea.
For a while I’ve been campaigning in my corner of the twitterverse to fix Follow Friday:
http://faseidl.com/public/item/231723
However, even though the #ff2 tag was introduced only 24 hrs ago in my post and another by @swoodruff, if you search for #ff2 you’ll find lots of tweets that use that tag with nothing more than a list of user names. Strange that someone would read a post about the reason for introducing #ff2 and proceed to use it in exactly the old way.
Andrew, I see your point clearly, but I will disagree with you in many aspects. #followfriday is an opportunity for twitter members to get to know new people. Certainly I have seen followers adding themselves to the list of “recommended” people and this I certainly don’t condone. This is cheap self-promotion and when I RT a #followfriday post with my name on it, I delete it. But you are not seeing how helpful this is to learn to reach out. I explain: I do lots and lots of RTs of #followfriday posts. Surely I have my inbox filled with dozens of requests. I can’t help that. As you know, we are never under any obligation to accept them. End of story. But this is my philosophy: be generous with your #followfriday post. Don’t do it for yourself. Think that if you RT a post with 5 or 6 names on it, other folks in my account (perhaps not me) could be interested! I will continue to participate actively on #followfridays and I will always encourage others to do so.
Jack, Wow, that is really cool, I went on and added a description for the tag. I need to go back and learn more. Thanks for the tips on filtering in tweetdeck.
Excellent…
http://tagal.us/tag/rec
I’ve started filtering out in Tweetdeck with:
filter, Text, [-], #f
This gets rid of #ff and #followfriday
Jason, I concur. I noticed that even though I was getting a lot of followfriday recommendations I actually got more follows on other days and those follows were more aligned with me and the info I tweet about.
Hi – nice topic Andrew. I for one am wary when someone comes along with a “this is how you should do x” on twitter… I mean it’s a personal experience. It’s like telling someone how to use their browser. I like FF and when I see the mondo FF tweets… well if they are from someone I have interacted with or in some way respect their opinion… I usually check those folks out and decide for myself whether or not to follow them. Pretty simple. Rather than trying to replace FF, why not just adapt the use of your #rec at any time… not just a Friday? It seems that would serve the purpose better without pigeon-holing your #rec nor messing with the current FF “experience” (LOL).
Thanks!
~ Jim
~ tweet: seo_web_design
Hello Jim, thanks for taking the time to read this post and comment. I agree this is not a replacement for followfriday but something different. It is possible for them to coexist serving different purposes for different people.
I proposed in my article that I would recommend people whenever I interact with an individual regardless of the day. I have done that and found it very rewarding.
I hope you give it a try.
Great discussion of a hot topic.
I myself have adopted a personal style of recommendation and prefer to read personalized recos. I think I’m going to drop #ff completely, but I do add a hashtag for the group I follow – like #smallbizchat or #brandchat. My rationale is that this encourages people with like-minded interests and who may not follow me to see my reco.
Andrew – you say: “whole purpose of recommending someone is to let YOUR network know that YOU recommend someone…”
EXACTLY! So, based on that comment, wouldn’t removing the #ff or #rec hashtag – entirely – achieve that result? If I reco someone in my network or group, it is seen ONLY by those people, who in turn, might not already follow that user. With a personal comment, my followers will then have enough info to make the decision to follow or not.
To me, this seems like a more precise, albeit slower method of gaining followers. However, for those of us interested in quality vs. quantity, I see it as a win.
I must admit, I’ve only been using Twitter for a few months, so I may have missed something here. Your thoughts? Regards, Sonia
Trevor, Absolutely, I hadn’t heard of @carl_ingalls approach but is appears that I am suggesting the same thing. I suggest the hashtag #rec so it becomes searchable.
Thanks for you comment!
That sounds like the #1followfriday hash I saw recommended about 2 weeks ago. I also stopped “doing” followfriday when it became the norm to list your entire follow list. Prior to that I had typically held that a single follow recommendation with an explanation was the best way for it to work.
I know I receive a half dozen recommendations every Friday, but the only new followers I tend to get from those bulk #followfriday posts are Twitter spammers. So, please, feel free to not bulk recommend me!
I’m right there with you on dropping the #followfriday hashtag. I’m not sure that ANY hashtag is really necessary for recommendations, but having something to glue the archives together does have some benefit. I DO think setting aside a specific day (of your own choosing) to be sure and recommend someone to your network is a great idea.
David, Me too! It was a great relief to come to this understanding. Also, even though I get recommended numerous times on #followfriday it seems that I do not get more followers on Fridays than other days. In fact I get less due to a poor signal to noise ratio. The barrage of #followfriday tweets creates so much noise that it is hard to tune into valuable signals.
Thanks for your comment
I am sorry that you had this experience, but in the long run it the knowledge you learned from it will make you a more valued member of your twitter community. It is really amazing, I didn’t try my own strategy until after I wrote this blog post. When I did, I felt really good – it is so much more gratifying to tell why you are recommending someone, it provides so much more value for everyone involved.
Thanks for taking the time to comment.
Janet, that is the way to go, do you use a hashtag?
The whole idea of Follow Friday on Twitter was great until people started tweeting a whole list of people. I may have been guilty of doing this once but it did serve as a turning point.
From that tweet on I vowed to do one #ff tweet per week, on a Friday, to recommend just one person and explain my recommendation.
Yes, it is possible to filter out abusers, but it is not only about the spammy aspect. I think the goal is to provide an alternative that allows us to improve our experience on twitter by recommending followers who truly add value and do so in a way that is easy for others to find and understand why the person has been recommended.
Thanks for reading and commenting
Yes. I usually say something like #followfriday on Tuesday.
Thanks for commenting and would love to here about your experience using #rec and inlcuding context
Thank you Michael, I can certainly see the challenge you have before you. The social obligation of reciprocal acknowledgment and niceties can be daunting. While i don’t have nearly as many folllowers as you I am mixed about whether or not to thank each individual for retweets. This article alone got nearly 100 in the last 24 hours. I think I would prefer to wait to an appropriate moment and honor them with a #rec.
Have you thought about sharing this idea with your followers to see what they think? Their input would be much appreciated and helpful to get some insight into where this may lead.
Thanks Bea, seems that you have already adopted a similar method that I suggest. I am glad that it works for you. Including context in regard to why follow is key.
Andrew
Absolutely, sorry it took so long for me to reply to your comment. I don’t think that #followfriday originated as a bad idea, but certainly evolved into something that is detrimental to the twitterverse. I took some time and looked at your blog and really like what you are saying. I highly recommend everyone who is interested in twitter culture and social media to take a look as well. Seems that independently we’ve come to the same conclusions.
I agree completely and am also guilty.
Hello Sonia,
Sonia,
You are coming to much of the same realization that may of us have. To answer your question about removing the hashtag entirely… The problem is one of search. Unless a common identifier is used with tweets that recommend people to follow, it is very difficult to search and find those tweets. A hashtag is a commonly accepted identifier used that allows the quick and easily discovery of the information sought. The more people you follow, the more useful hashtags become. I would suspect that most recommendations made without the #followfriday hashtag, are not seen. Additionally, all hashtags are subject to hashtag abuse, both deliberate and ignorant. Anyone can apply a hashtag to any tweet regardless of whether appropriate or not. This is done by marketers to spam participants of tweetchats.
So the answer is particular to your own beliefs. I use the #rec hashtag, even though I know that it is not a commonly known practice, so that folks who are aware of this can search for my recommendations. I do not use followfriday because then my recommendations would get lost in the ocean of lists. You may chose not to tag your recommendations, and that too would be fine. The bottom line is that the best way to find interesting folks to follow is to watch those that you follow, who add value to your experience, and see who they are talking too; it is a good bet that these folks would also add value.
Thanks for reading and for your comment.