If you are on Twitter, you may have noticed that, every Friday, people start to use the hastag #followfriday with wild abandon.
Follow Friday is the brain child of Micah Baldwin and friends who decided to start recommending people for their followers to follow every Friday. They added the hashtag (that is the #followfriday that organizes topic threads on Twitter) and started a Twitter wide phenomena. Just watch this page on any Friday to see what I mean.
But what has always struck me about follow Friday is that it’s basically a selfless trend. Sure, some people are demanding that people follow them every Friday but the majority of tweets under that hashtag are people trying to get followers for other people. The spirit of the original day was to recommend cool people to your followers and, for the most part, it has stayed true to that original idea.
In a modern world where everyone seems to put themselves first, I cannot help but feel like that is pretty cool. It’s a simple idea and a really beautiful one. It’s like saying, “I enjoy your tweets so I am going to tell my followers to follow you in turn.” There is no greater endorsement than a recommendation from a stranger who has nothing to gain by recommending you and no greater feeling than knowing that you are appreciated. ColderICE took this a step even farther last Friday by recommending some eBay related Twitter users on his blog and I know that follow Friday inspired me to create the Shop tab above highlighting the stores of my fellows and also why I try to retweet the good stuff I read and otherwise find on the web. It feels good to pay it forward!
Tweet others how you would like to be tweeted is the moral of the story, I suppose.
So this Friday take the spirit of that out off line. Recommend your friend’s book to a co-worker. Your brother’s landscaping company to a neighbor. If there is someone cool in your life, recommend them to someone else. Or just let that person know they are cool themselves. If everyone did that, even just once a week, the world would be a better place.
And they say the internet isn’t good for anything. . .
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Actually, I’m not a fan and I don’t partake 🙂 Also, I’m not quite so sure it’s about giving as much as getting.
It started innocently enough, but it’s almost all I’m seeing in the feed today. The cranky side of me wants to post:
#followfriday – Look at who I follow and follow them!
In reality what I feel like this has become is a “you pat my back, I’ll pat yours” way for super-users to gain huge numbers of followers fast. (Thus the getting).
I don’t doubt that it started with good intentions, but I’ve slowly crept from thinking, “I wish this was a monthly event,” to “I wish this was an annual event.”
I know I’m very much the minority viewpoint here, though I did tweet with one like-minded person today.
I mean really, a tweet with 5 or 6 people to follow would be great, but when I see 6,7,8 such tweets from the same person in a row I begin to evaluate whether they’re actually worth the follow or not. Again, if I valued anyone’s opinion THAT much on who I should follow, I’d take the trouble of manually checking it out.
Thanks for the post on this Hillary, it gave me a way to vent in over 140 characters!
Cliff
Actually, I’m not a fan and I don’t partake 🙂 Also, I’m not quite so sure it’s about giving as much as getting.
It started innocently enough, but it’s almost all I’m seeing in the feed today. The cranky side of me wants to post:
#followfriday – Look at who I follow and follow them!
In reality what I feel like this has become is a “you pat my back, I’ll pat yours” way for super-users to gain huge numbers of followers fast. (Thus the getting).
I don’t doubt that it started with good intentions, but I’ve slowly crept from thinking, “I wish this was a monthly event,” to “I wish this was an annual event.”
I know I’m very much the minority viewpoint here, though I did tweet with one like-minded person today.
I mean really, a tweet with 5 or 6 people to follow would be great, but when I see 6,7,8 such tweets from the same person in a row I begin to evaluate whether they’re actually worth the follow or not. Again, if I valued anyone’s opinion THAT much on who I should follow, I’d take the trouble of manually checking it out.
Thanks for the post on this Hillary, it gave me a way to vent in over 140 characters!
Cliff
Oh, and just so I don’t sound like a total crank and cynic, let me say thanks for including my items in the shop feed you have up! I hope it’s EPN enabled and we both make some money off the exposure!
Thanks,Cliff
Oh, and just so I don’t sound like a total crank and cynic, let me say thanks for including my items in the shop feed you have up! I hope it’s EPN enabled and we both make some money off the exposure!
Thanks,Cliff