FollowFriday is out of control.
I started off as a fine concept – every Friday, Twitter users would suggest a list of people they followed whom they believed others would also enjoy. The hashtag “#followfriday” was added to every one of these tweets, to make it easy to aggregate up all the suggestions.
For a while, this was pretty cool. Twitter users could depend upon receiving a number of new folks to check out each week, and all was well in the Twitterverse.
However, as time as progressed, FollowFriday has really ballooned into something untenable. Most people simply tweet list after list of random people, with little or no context as to WHY these Twitter users are worthy of your time. Due to this glut, many users don’t even bother following the people recommended – unless they’re really looking towards gathering huge numbers of follows. Also, many times, people will add a user to a #followfriday list who has protected updates – which is pretty annoying, as there’s no way to even figure out if that person is interesting.
@curiousillusion and I have a solution to this problem.
It’s called Fussy Follow Friday.
Here’s how it works – instead of listing many, MANY suggested Twitter users each week, with FussyFollowFriday (or #3F), you are limited to one single recommendation.
Just one.
So choose wisely. It’s also suggested that in your #3F tweet you provide some type of context or explanation as to WHY this person is rocking your Twitter world. If you need more than a few characters to explain, feel free to link to a blog post describing your #3F choice. Add the hashtag “#3F” or “#fussyfollowfriday” (if you’re not into the whole brevity thing) and you’re good to go. Update: you are HIGHLY ENCOURAGED to not “replace” the #followfriday hashtag with #3F, but use BOTH. For the reasons behind this, check the comments to this post. If you look at the original #followfriday tweet, you’ll see that #3F is actually MORE in sync with the original intent than what we currently have!
I suppose it should go without saying that your #3F tweet should appear on a Friday. Well, there. I said it.
Are you with us? If so, join us this Friday for the very first #3F ever. And in preparation, let people know about the FussyFollowFriday revolution by tweeting something like this:
I’m tired of #followfriday overload! This week I’m going to be Fussy! #3F https://bit.ly/98OMQ{.linkification-ext} (click here to automagically tweet this)
I’m looking forward to YOUR recommendations! Let’s clean up that signal-to-noise ratio and make Fridays on Twitter a thing of beauty again. I also encourage you to check out @curiousillusion’s blog post on the subject for a slightly different perspective.