I’ve harped several times on how much I have grown to dislike Follow Friday on Twitter. I’ve written at least two posts about it (here and here) and why I have grown to hate it.
The Oatmeal really summed up the problems with Follow Friday well. If you’re not familiar with it, Follow Friday (with the hashtag #FF typically) is when people are supposed to recommend people they find to be good follows on Twitter. We all follow people on Twitter for a lot of reasons and we find new people in a lot of different ways. The origins of Follow Friday was a way for people to find new, interesting people on Twitter to follow. Typically people posted the recommendation to follow someone with reasons to follow them. “If you want to know what’s going on with local news, you should follow this person,” for example.
But people today just give a long list of people to follow with the hashtag and no reasons to follow them. Sometimes there’s a short “journalists” or “funny people” tag. But it’s not very helpful. I’m more likely to find new people to follow based on who follows me or what the people I follow retweet.
I know a lot of other people have made the same complaints about Follow Friday, and I’ve always wondered if there’s a way to take it back. What if we just started making Follow Friday recommendations the way it’s supposed to work? But would this be helpful? I’m curious. Do you find any Follow Friday recommendations helpful? Would you use them if people went back to giving thoughtful reasons to follow someone? I’m curious, so this post is about research. Vote in the poll and post a comment below. Tell me how you would like to see recommendations happen on Twitter. Tell me how you find people to follow on Twitter.
Update: Great comments from Yuri Victor on Twitter in response to my post.
@jenconnic If it's a person I think is awesome, I follow their suggestions immediately. But always say why I should #FF a person.
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Yuri Victor (@yurivictor) December 09, 2011@jenconnic I wish more people I love on Twitter did #FF. I've found so many gems from others.
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Yuri Victor (@yurivictor) December 09, 2011
I sometimes thank people who put me on their #FF lists, but usually I don’t. I rarely click on anyone in a list, even when I’m on the list. If I do a #FF (or #JFF for Jersey), I try to add what is great about the person – in fact just today I did one for one person. It’s a rarity though.
I used Follow Friday lists a lot when I first started tweeting, but now I mostly ignore them. In fact, I follow two people (who I like) who carpet bomb my timeline each friday with the same lists. I had to mute them both and as a result I miss some good tweets from them. I’m much more likely to follow new people that are retweeted by people I already follow than via an #FF mention.
Thanks for your comments, guys.
JD, how would you improve Follow Friday?
I think the only way to actually change it would be to get some of the more famous users to mock it. You need to reach the less-savvy twitter users, and they usually follow the famous people. I doubt that will happen, so I think the most practical way to do it is the way you do it: remind the followers that you have how silly #FF can be. It’s incremental at best, but it’s probably the best we can do.
If the Oatmeal can’t get people to change a bit, who can? Heh.
[...] week I posted asking if people actually use Follow Friday any more on Twitter to find new people. I also wanted to find out how people find new people to [...]