Follow Friday has been a Twitter phenomenon for years. People tweet out the usernames of other Twitter users that they think are worth following, in a way to give recognition to those sending out useful, funny, cool, interesting, insightful or otherwise stand-out tweets.

However, many people are misusing the #FollowFriday and #FF hashtags, and not getting the most out of Follow Friday. Here’s the one tip you need to follow if you want to participate effectively – and it will only take about 30 seconds to implement.
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If you’ve seen the #FollowFriday or #FF hashtags floating around today, you’ll already have some idea of what I’m going to recommend you do as a little Twitter weekend homework – but you can’t procrastinate! You’ve got to get on this one right away.
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Every Friday, the Twitterverse comes together to share the best of the best on Twitter with each other – and anyone can get in on this conversation. #FollowFriday, or shortened to simply #FF, is a hashtag that has spawned one of the most popular trends in Twitter’s history. Ever had a follower or followee that you wanted to share with others? Use the #FollowFriday hashtag to hop on the karma train.
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As well as improving the overall look of the pages, Twitter has added a way to include descriptions to each of your lists, something I felt was an oversight back in my original look at the feature.

It’s absolutely worth taking a moment to accurately add a brief note to each of your lists. Give people a reason to sign up.

This naturally will lead to a better way to search lists, too – it’s much easier to interpret a sentence or two than it is (what is often) a fairly non-descriptive list name.

Moreover, this may well be the final nail in the coffin of #followfriday.

It’s not available to everybody just yet, but Twitter has started to add the promised lists feature to user accounts.

Already, many lists have been built. You can check out the Twitter team here, for example. And when you visit a list page, you can easily follow the updates of everybody within that group, and more conveniently, add them all with just one click.

Within your own profile, you’ll (soon) notice a new lists link where you can check out any lists to which you have been added.

From here you can also see any lists you are following yourself.

This, of course, poses a major threat to the very similar TweepML service. More agreeably, it should also hopefully put a major dent in the #followfriday meme, which is, in my opinion, well past its sell-by date.

This will be an extremely useful feature for any and all tribes that use the Twitter platform – for example, it’s now very easy to link up everybody who works at a given organisation, and fans can quickly group their favourite sports teams and TV show casts.

One (obvious) thing that’s missing would be a way to add a note next to each person in your list explaining why they have been included. Otherwise, there’s not much more incentive to follow anybody within that group (and certainly the entire group itself) just because they’re there.

If it’s an established team (like the aforementioned Twitter or Mashable lists) then I can immediately see the value. It’s less apparent when it’s a list of people you don’t know who have been collated simply because they’re ‘cool’ in the opinion of somebody else. This of course is one of the more common complaints about #followfriday recommendations when made in bulk. And it won’t be too long before some genius starts putting lists of mass-marketers and spammers together. (Maybe a way to mass unfollow or block everybody in a given list might be nice?)

Still, this should be fun, and I would imagine could have a positive effect on many of our follower counts. Will you be building any lists? Let me know your thoughts in the comments area below.

Hey, check this out. You know #followfriday, where you can make recommendations of cool people to follow on the Friday of each week? Good times. If so, then you’re probably also aware of TopFollowFriday.com, a site that ranks the most highly-recommended folk.

For example, here’s a screenshot from today’s chart:

I have two problems with this.

1. It’s not Friday, and
2. How in blue blazes am I number one?

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#followfriday is a weekly-event on Twitter that’s a lot of fun: each Friday, you make a list of recommended Twitter accounts that you think other folk should follow, and share these via the #followfriday hashtag.

For me, each week it gets more difficult. As my follower count grows I continue to interact and engage with a lot of great people and sometimes despite my best intentions (and a wealth of recommendations) it’s easy to overlook a few people, completely by accident. Because Twitter moves so fast and because I tweet so much, it’s very easy to forget what happened yesterday, let alone a week ago.

Enter The Twitter Tag Project, and their excellent Follow Friday! tool.

Enter your username enter the input box and hit the Go button, and seconds later the site will return a list of your most active friends – that is, those people you most engaged with over the last 200 tweets you sent – conveniently broken-down into tweetable chunks. Better, it presents you with ‘Tweet This’ buttons which allow you to quickly and easily forward these results to Twitter (or copy and paste into your favourite client).

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#followfriday is a weekly event that takes place on Twitter where users recommend other users to their followers whose Tweets they enjoy. The point is that one hopes that by suggesting these fine folks, other people will follow them, too.

The way it normally works is in one or more Tweets you’ll write something like:

Here are some cool people you should follow:
@userone @usertwo @userthree @userfour
@userfive #followfriday

The #followfriday part is known as a hashtag, and other Twitterers can collectively view all contributions to a single hashtag either at Hashtags.org or via Twitter search.

Let’s get one thing straight from the start: I like the idea of #followfriday. In principle, it’s a good way to introduce people whose Tweets you enjoy to other people who might enjoy them, too.

I just have a couple of minor problems with it. One, I wonder if any of your followers actually end up following these people. And two, I’m not sure I’ll ever understand the point of asking people to follow users who are already massively popular.

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