Using #FollowFriday for Your Business Blog
What is #followfriday?
It started with Micah Baldwin (@micah) over a year ago as a way to recommend people on Twitter whose tweets he enjoyed. It quickly became a phenomenon. Every Friday thousands of people on Twitter use the hashtag #followfriday or #ff to suggest people to follow (in a single tweet). For example:
#followfriday B2B Marketing Posse likes to follow: @ntos @tferriss @answeryes and @wendymarx
It is recommended you keep it to one tweet a week (this is not about tweeting everyone you know with everyone you know). Ideally, try to pick less “popular” people even if they don’t have a lot of followers. Rather, recommend people because they consistently have something useful or entertaining to say. The truth is you don’t have to recommend the Twitterati as even n00bs will have no trouble discovering Robert Scoble, Pete Cashmore, and Ev Williams in short order on their own. If you are truly interested to see who endorses whom then TopFollowFriday.com does the job.
It is very important to include #followfriday or #ff somewhere in your tweet so others can find it on Twitter Search. Also important, don’t start your tweet with an @ or Twitter will think it is a reply.
Taking it one step further…
Now that Twitter has Lists (and Annotations are just around the corner) you might think that a kitschy meme like #followfriday will fall out of favor. But according to LetsTell’s Twitter Hash Tag Indexer, it still remains in the top 10 of all hashtags on any given day. Quite frankly, it is the only hashtag that has lasted with any measure of consistent meaning. Most hashtags tend to be extemporaneous, best used to inspire conversations (and in the process get new followers) around a campaign or an event.
Using #followfriday to tweet a list of people you endorse is fine but why not send them to your blog? Chris Brogan made a simple suggestion on his blog recently: tweet a link back to your blog where the list of people (Twitter links) reside in a post. Yes, of course, do this and reap the benefit of the extra web traffic.
Schedule a new post every Friday with different themes like favorite authors, success coaches, or b2b marketing gurus (wink). You could even recommend your own Twitter Lists!
By the way, if you are having trouble deciding who to endorse, The Twitter Tag Project has a niffy little tool to help.
Happy tweeting!
June 22nd, 2010 at 2:48 am
these are the things that i like to see posted up. thanks.
June 19th, 2010 at 7:09 am
I enjoyed your blog which instructing nice guidelines for the betterment of the site and business promotion.keep sharing.
June 16th, 2010 at 4:26 pm
awesome thanks!
June 16th, 2010 at 2:03 am
Now I understand what #followfriday is all about. Thanks for detail explanation and links.
June 15th, 2010 at 8:45 am
nice blog (: you should follow me on twitter @gr8p <33
June 15th, 2010 at 1:50 am
Thanks for the important source and I want to follow too.keep sharing.
June 14th, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Been looking for details on ff all over. Nice blog.
June 13th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Cool idea.Would include meme related to topic to narrow down search.
June 11th, 2010 at 11:03 pm
Great idea but would still put do the old way too. Reason being people stay inside the Twitter timeline as they link to each endorsement.
June 11th, 2010 at 7:42 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by . said: [...]
June 11th, 2010 at 5:12 pm
Great idea! I’m doing this and following you guys!
June 11th, 2010 at 5:17 am
thanks to your ideas , i adore to read your weblog as usually as i can. have a good day