Blogging Success Summit 2011 is a live online conference for corporate and business bloggers that brings together 23 experts from the world of online media, including Richard Jalichandra (Technorati), Mike Volpe (HubSpot), Rick Calvert (BlogWorld), and Michael Stelzner (Social Media Examiner).
Event runs February 1 to February 22 (fully online). Register before January 20th and save 50% plus get $794 in free bonuses!
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!
Sysomos, a leading provider of social media monitoring and analytics technology, has released a new report on the blogosphere after analyzing over 100 million blog posts. The report is broken down by age, gender and location.
Not all that surprising, 53.3% of the total blogging population is 21-35 years old. Bloggers aged 20 and under came in second, with 20.2%, followed by 36-50-year-olds (at 19.4%), and 51-year-olds and older (7.1%).
Read the complete report here.
Facebook’s privacy policy has gotten more than its share of media coverage (good and bad) so I don’t intend to sacrifice any more pixels to the subject other than to record the following Reuters (The New York Times) links here for posterity (this is one of the main reasons why I blog after all).
And some of you might be interested in this previous blog post.
BtoB magazine has created the first annual Social Media Marketing Awards, honoring the b-to-b marketers and agencies for “superior use of social media channels” in seven categories:
Nominations from marketers and agencies are being accepted through Feb. 19. There is a $50 fee per submission. Winners will be announced in the April issue of BtoB. For more information, visit: www.btobonline.com/socialawards.
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