Why I Won’t Mention You on Follow Friday #FF

Hang around Twitter for a while and you’ll notice some confusing things. If you’re new, you’ll likely be curious about the hashtag, #ff.

A hashtag is any text proceeded by the ‘#’ symbol. It’s an easy way to clasify a tweet with a topic or idea. In nearly every twitter client, and the website itself, you can click on a hashtage and see related tweets. Pretty cool.

What is Follow Friday #FF?

On Friday you’ll likely see many #ff and #followfriday hashtags. The intent of follow Friday is to highlight a handful of your followers and connect them with each other. That’s a really great idea. It’s like showing up at a party where you only know one person. That friend happens to be really kind and he likes you, so he intorduces you to five of his friends.

After hanging out with your new friends for a while they introduce you to some of their friends who they think you’ll hit it off with. Before long you’ll know some great people, all who have been recommended by your friends. It beats striking up a conversation with a stranger and hoping you have something in common.

Why I Don’t Participate in Follow Friday #FF

While I love the intent of follow Friday, I don’t participate. At least not in the traditional way. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very thankful to be mentioned nearly every Friday and find new friends as a result. I just think it’s awfully tough to follow a list of usernames I know nothing about. I’d much rather have a personal introduction and some background on why I should care.

Personal introductions are a much slower way to build friendships. But, instead of a mass of semi-random people following you, they might actually lead to something more worthwhile. A business partnership, life long friendship, or even a marriage. I have friend who met his wife on MySpace, so don’t knock it.

My Version of Follow Friday #FF

For the past year I’ve been interviewing people with interesting stories and spreading them to my Coach Radio listeners. Every week I tell one story at a time.

As I keep up this schedule, you’ll have at least 50 people I think you should be following on Twitter every year. You can hear their stories and decide for yourself if you should be following them, instead of picking from a random list. Yes, 50 isn’t a lot, but relationships aren’t about numbers.

To coincide with this, I’m changing the Your Story schedule and, starting next week, releasing them every Friday. I’ll use the #ff hashtag each time. You can click through to the show page for a quick synopsis of that person, or listen to the full interveiw if you like.

Instead of following random people, now you’ll have a reason.

My Suggestions

If you’re just getting started, here are a few people I think you should follow right out of the gate. Be sure to click through to their story to read and hear why.

photo credit Steve Woolf