Do You #FollowFriday on Twitter? What #FF Means and How to Use it Effectively
If you’ve been on Twitter for any length of time, your page may burst into a flurry of usernames every Friday. Follow Friday, more commonly known by the hashtag #ff, was originally created by a tweeter in 2009 to recommend followers to others. Before long, it took on a life of its own, and users were sharing their Follow Friday recommendations with the Twitterverse every week.
As with a lot of things on Twitter, being “in the know” about how #FollowFriday works is important. Just sharing a list of names along with the Follow Friday hashtag, like "#ff @sherice @technorati, @trarticles, @blogworld" won’t mean anything to anyone. Including information on why they should follow that person, and leaving plenty of room for other users to retweet it, is key to getting your Twitter introductions out there.
For example – "Follow @sherice on Twitter for helpful web design and online marketing tips #ff" – not only recommends who to follow, but why. You can include the #ff at the beginning or end of the tweet. While the “rules” for Follow Friday aren’t carved in stone, there are some tips to make it truly worthwhile to your users:
- It’s best to recommend one Twitter user per #FollowFriday tweet – two or three just doesn’t leave you much room to tell people why they should follow these folks.
- You can safely recommend anywhere from 1-5 users to follow every Friday without clogging up the conversation. Any more than that, and your #ff tweets tend to be ignored.
- Break out of your regular tweeting routine by periodically recommending followers outside of your niche.
- If you’ve got too many people to recommend and not enough Fridays to share them all, consider creating a #FollowFriday list on Twitter.
- If you find yourself forgetting to recognize people on #followfriday, you can use a free scheduling service like Hootsuite or Sendible to schedule tweets for you automatically.
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