The #FollowFriday (#FF) Enigma On Twitter

If you’re active on Twitter and watch live streams regularly then you probably notice the flood of Tweets the come in every Friday.  The increase of volume is due to these Follow tweets that people are throwing into the Twitterverse.  These tweets, usually containing either #FF or #FollowFriday, are laced with the usernames of favorite Twitter people in that userslist.  The entire point?  To get people followed.

The whole process started back in Januray of 2009 by a user named @micah.  While various people have different motives for participating the main point behind #FF is to promote your followers.  There’s a lot of benefit in doing so depending on what you’re using the service for overall.  If you’re there for branding and to lead generation for example, you can build a lot of rapport with the followers you engage by promoting their username.

There are many who believe it’s just a lot of self-gratification and a means of getting attention.  If one person promotes enough people then they’re likely to get promoted a lot as well.  Regardless of the social network, it always seems to boil down to “getting more followers”.

I’m sure there have been some great networking opportunities that came from Follow Friday, but the value of the promotion is severely limited.  This is especially true when someone has a lot of followers to promote.  You often end up with a string of usernames and only the hashtag #FF.  Unless someone specifically types a list name or names the grouping of people into a specific career or interest category then you have no idea why those people are being promoted and if they provide any follow.  You’re forced to look at their profile, read up on them and make your own decision.

It’s like haveing your friend introduce you to someone as: “Hey Mark, this is Brian.”  And then he walks away leaving the two of you to stare at each other.  It’s a one way introduction that doesn’t do a lot to foster conversation.  That begs the question then – Why is it working so well?

I think people enjoy promotion, especially if it means getting something in return.  When you follow people on Twitter, you expect to be followed in return.  If you promote someone, people have a reasonable expectation to be promoted as well.  The problem with the trend here is that it’s transforming into a fad and just “The thing to do” on Friday.  With so many participating in #FollowFirday, reguar users are now forced to deal with a Noise Vs. Value issue.

Early on, the #FF tag did provide value as people only promoted those who were worth promoting.  Many even including bio tags to help show why they were promoting someone and made it easier to connect with people we had something in common with – it was a real introduction.  It’s just not the case anymore, as mentioned above.  Now, promotion has turned into a lot of noise as users fill a tweet with usernames and post it only to repeat the process upwards of a dozen more times just to make sure they’re promoting all the people they can throughout the day.  For anyone who has a fair number of followers, it pollutes the livestream.  During the week for example I can count on the people I’m following to post or retweet useful content Monday through Thursday.  On Friday, my livestream is almost unreadable.

As with any fad, people will eventually fall out and lose interest.  More than likely due to annoyance.  Unless some kind of control is put into place, the value of #FollowFriday will be lost in the noise.

One movement being called for is a filter within Twitter that lets people “ignore” or filter out tweets containing specific keywords or hashtags.  Ironically enough, it’s being promoted with a hashtag:  #StopFF (Stop Follow Friday).

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2. Knocking Down Spam On Twitter
3. Become a Twitter Ninja with Subconscious Marketing
4. Twitter Setting Up to Dominate Local Search
5. Twitter Followers – Breaking The Habit

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