I’m Going To Miss #Followfriday When It’s Gone
The fact is that #followfriday—the tradition started on Twitter to alert your followers about your favorite people that you follow—is close to being dead. When Twitter was a much smaller and more close-knit community, this was a very useful way to pass around the handles of people whom were saying the most interesting things, at least that particular week. Now, the environment has gotten too big and believe it or not you Twitter purists, it’s gotten better because of the explosive population growth. There’s more people listening, contributing and more to tap into making Twitter much more interesting and powerful as a community and as a media phenomenon. The problem with continuing the practice of #followfriday is that, well, there’s too many good people to just limit to 140 characters. People have all but given up on the practice or found better ways to delineate to their followers just who they think are good tweeters.
One way the practice has evolved is to rely on the favorites bookmarking feature. @scobilizer has been telling people to check his favorited tweets for the people he’d recommend following. Before that, I saw @arjunbasu mentioning to his followers to just check his favorite tweets for his recommendations on who to follow on Fridays instead of #followfriday. His favorite tweets were generally people he found funny. Other people listed in a blog post their favorites, adding to the list as they saw fit. For me, I wrote a post on Mashable about some of the most valuable people I followed.
For a long time, I relied on #followfriday to not only find new peeps to follow on Twitter but also to be followed, by earning a #followfriday shout out by other tweeters. I happen to have really liked the meme but it’s too hard to pick from the people I follow just a few to recommend. Additionally, people really want the reason why I picked a particular person for #followfriday. I found myself working very hard to write up why I was picked one Tweeter in particular over others. Let’s face it, I love Twitter because it’s easy not hard and writing those recommendations took more brainpower than I was willing to invest.
Option abound. There are websites that track and chart the people who are retweeted the most or individual tweets favorited by the most people. There’s the much-derided official Twitter recommended follow list. You can scour blog posts on various websites to find individual lists of people to follow in whatever quality interests you in a tweeter the most.
Or you can join conversations and follow threads to find the people that people you admire are following and conversing with. To me that’s the best way to discover new people to follow. When I jumped into Twitter and didn’t have #followfriday as a guide, it was how I did it and I still find it to be the most fun and satisfying way to gather good, smart followers. Serendipitously discovering new Twitterers to follow by watching the stream of conversations is the still the best way. Now with so many more people on twitter, engaging in conversations from a multitude of industries, backgrounds and geographic areas the joy of discovery is even more so.