Your Twitter Weekend Homework: Participate in #FollowFriday

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.

Follow Friday is a community-created event that happens every Friday on Twitter. Throughout the day, people will list accounts that they recommend along with a #FollowFriday or #FF hashtag. These accounts could be great marketers, funny parody accounts, or useful in some way – they might not even be related, but they’re all vouched for by someone you follow.

Participating in Follow Friday is a great way to show your followers some love. And it only takes about 30 seconds.

First, choose 1-4 accounts that you would like to recommend. You can go with your gut instincts here, or browse your @mention history to see who you’ve chatted with a lot this past week. Or you can share accounts that you’ve retweeted a lot. Or ones that share great insight. It’s up to you how you decide who you want to recommend.

Next, start your tweet with #FollowFriday (or #FF to save precious character space) and list the @names of the accounts you recommend.

One word of advice when composing your Follow Friday tweet: don’t start with the names of the accounts you recommend and add #FF at the end – this way, your tweet will only be seen in the timeline of the person you listed first, and in the others’ @mentions. It will be treated as a reply. You want this tweet to be seen by everyone, so don’t mistakenly begin with someone’s username.

Some of the best #FF tweets I’ve seen include a small note as to why the accounts are being recommended. Something like “marketers”, “link sharers” or “funny peeps”.

Or, if you’ve got time, you can tweet out each account in its own #FF tweet which includes a longer description of why each is worth a follow.

And that’s all there is to it!

You’ve got to do this today, however, if you want to complete your homework by the weekend, as #FollowFriday doesn’t really work on a Saturday. So get tweeting!

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