A Perceived Value of #FollowFriday
I’ve been very honored to have a great group of followers on Twitter and all of you make my day go by a lot faster. Your unique content, hilarious replies and interesting links keep things fun. The latest trend in Twitter is #FollowFriday. The idea is simple. Pick a few people that you love following on Twitter, tag the tweet with #followfriday and mention which people you think your followers should also follow.
The idea is perfect for Twitter which is an ecosystem built of recommendations, suggestions, sharing and influence. The users grasp to this concept because they have a chance to recommend their favorite Twitter users and at the same time, users get a bit of an ego boost in the form of being recommended to be followed. Aside from that, there is zero value in FollowFriday. If the value of Twitter is to get some ego boost with a mix of interesting information and social interaction time wasting then FollowFriday fits right into that model.
Some would argue that’s what Twitter is for and this post isn’t meant to argue that fact but the reality is that #FollowFriday continues to grow each week and the value of #FollowFriday continues to drop. Earlier today I sent a tweet that said”
ANNOUNCEMENT: If you recommend me for #followfriday, I will probably follow you back
45 people recommended me for #FollowFriday after that but my name was buried in a tweet with 5 other Twitter names. If #FollowFriday is being done by everyone you follow, well you’d be following thousands of new people every Friday. It’s ineffective and therefore this act of goodwill turns into noise. It blips on my Twitter reader as a reply and I’m on the edge of filtering out all of the tweets containing the hashtag because the noise is just too much.
At the end of the day, #FollowFriday is only valuable to those recommending and those being recommended. Forgive my choice of an example but let’s think of it like a toilet. The person doing the dumping has a sign of relief while the toilet is proud to be used for its intended purpose. Everyone else in the bathroom just gets a whiff of stink and is pretty turned off by the experience. This is how I feel about #FollowFriday. Since I’ve been the toilet nearly 50 times today, I say thanks because it’s cool being recommended but at the end of the day I’ve only gained 15 followers. That’s 15 new followers after 45 times of being recommended. Most of my followers have over 500 followers. That means after possibly being seen as a recommendation by 22 thousand people, I only walk away with 15 new followers.
I’m not saying #FollowFriday is a waste of time but I am saying that it’s intended purpose isn’t the end result and there are better ways to recommend people and “dumping in a toilet” isn’t the best approach.
