As a long time Twitter user I always see Tweeps tweeting Follow Friday but I never really understood the real concept behind Follow Friday. I always felt that it was just a bunch of people spamming some those keywords to create a “follow train” and eventually became very popular. I decided to do some research and found a good article explaining what it really is.
What is Follow Friday on Twitter
By Justin Germino
Follow Friday is a twitter meme that is used to call attention and indicate that your followers should check out and be a part of a conversation or read posts by someone who is participating in follow Friday. Tagging a tweet with #followfriday will allow it to be searched for and everyone who tags the same way can follow their own specific tweets and form a group conversation. Once engaged in a group if you want to call attention to an article, post or tweet you can simply Re-tweet something and add #followfriday to bring everyone’s attention to it.
Often when I do my Random Twitter poetry game, on Friday to get more participants to send me words I will tag my call for random words with FollowFriday so more people will play the game and see the poem that I have crafted based on random twitter words. It also allows people to see what the most popular discussions are taking place on a Friday, which is typically a less busy work day so more people spend time chatting on twitter than on other week days.
Many people feel that FollowFriday is exclusive and excludes people, but you can choose to participate anytime merely by tagging one of your tweets you wish to share. Follow Friday is one of many ways to try and draw in a reading crowd to get more people to notice what you are saying and bring people to draw attention to the tweets they wish to stand out more than others.
Many people new to Twitter can use #FollowFriday to find out who some of the most active and highly recommended people are to follow, and for people more experienced they can recommend new and upcoming twitter members who are showing very active in the community to help get them a boost in followers.
No matter how you use #FollowFriday or whether you choose not to use it, at least know that it is a popular term on twitter and you will see many people participating in it, I myself use it to bring in some notice to my call for posts and not as its original intention which was to specifically highlight and call out other twitter members, so technically I myself don’t use Follow Friday the way it was originally intended, but as more and more people participate you will probably see that the acronym becomes less and less significant over the months as it is over-utilized.
So click on a #followfriday tweet and see what all the noise is about the next Friday that rolls around you may find some interesting people to follow, or you may just decide that is a bunch of fluff.