How #FollowFriday Works
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What is #followfriday? Every Friday, you’ll see thousands of people on Twitter using this phrase, so we thought
we’d take a moment to explain what Follow Friday is, and how you can join in with this Twitter game.
Here is a quick guide to the FollowFriday phenomenon:
1. #followfriday is a game in which people suggest who to follow on Twitter. It helps everyone find interesting Twitter users. You list the users you recommend following and add “#followfriday” anywhere in the Tweet so others can find it. The “#” is very important – don’t forget it!
Example Tweet (feel free to copy this and replace the Twitter names with your friends’ Twitter names and reasons to follow):
What if you didn’t know who to follow on Twitter? Would you randomly start following people? Would you follow people you see mentioned by those you already follow? Most likely you would ask your friends for recommendations since you can trust that your friends will suggest people who are worth following. Which is exactly how FollowFriday began.
In mid-January, FollowFriday began with a simple tweet:
The idea is to think of interesting people you already follow and recommend them to others.
#FollowFriday: The Trend That Kept Trending
By Saturday morning, there was no trace of FollowFriday. A one-off fad, perhaps?
Then late the next Thursday night, suddenly #followfriday tweets began to appear in foreign languages! It seemed that FollowFriday was back. Now, every Friday, people suggest other people to follow. Here is a chart of the hours that #followfriday trended each week since it began:
What’s interesting is not that #followfriday trends for the full Friday each Friday, but that the bottom of the spikes have begun to spread out. Meaning that #followfriday is beginning to spread into Thursdays and Saturdays, US time. In other words: #followfriday is international.
Why #FollowFriday Works
FollowFriday is successful because of three main factors:
1. It’s easy. It takes little effort to send a tweet, something people do dozens of times a day.2. It’s participatory. You don’t need to be part of the “Twitterati” to participate. You can suggest one person or 100 people. You can get endorsements from one person or a hundred people.3. It’s karmic and it feels good. It’s a great feeling to simply say, “I think this person is great. You should follow them.”
#FollowFriday Tools & Resources
Some great sites have begun to crop up around the concept of FollowFriday. Scott Lemon created a site calledTopFollowFriday.com which analyzes who is “endorsing” and who is being “endorsed.”
Brian Roy collected thousands of tweets on FollowFriday and determined that more than 32,342 recommendations were made and more than 16,083 Twitter users were recommended. Now Brian has a trackerto follow FollowFriday (you can also track FollowFriday on Twitter Search). Even Jesse Stay of SocialToo has begun to look at reporting on FollowFriday statistics at the user level within his product.
Simply, FollowFriday is a strong example of a crowdsourced recommendation engine, which will always provide better results than an automated one. Twitter Grader, for example, currently lists Guy Kawasaki as the #1 Twitterer (as opposed to #28 on TopFollowFriday), and only 2 Twitterers in its top 25 have less than 10,000 followers. With the addition of trust, recommendation systems tend to excel over purely algorithmic systems. Of course, like any system, FollowFriday has its faults. There are no categories, nor ranking systems or even a guarantee that you will actually like following the people recommended.
Twitter has recently begun to make waves around becoming a search engine that allows for quick understanding of a topic or delivering an immediate response. In many ways, FollowFriday shows what happens when the Twitter community is asked a direct question: “Who do you think your friends should follow?
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