by James Hofheins, founder of Utah LEADS. Follow him @jwhof.
If you’re like me, you have a favorite restaurant. Mine is in downtown Salt Lake City. Every Friday, they serve a fantastic lentil soup. When I worked closer, I would find a reason to show up every Friday. Just for the tasty lentil soup.
It was always worth it.
I once took a friend with me to try it out and was a little shocked to see that before even tasting it, she salted it. I never had to do that, for the soup was always seasoned just right.
I used to have the same Friday relationship with Twitter.
Every Friday, I would find a reason to log on, just to experience the tasty goodness of the phenomenon we all know as Follow Friday.
Follow Friday was started in January, 2009 by Micah Baldwin (@micah) with just one tweet:
What a fantastic idea! I was excited to learn of something that would help me find other users, without having to do much more than set up a filter or search the term #followfriday.
In my early days on Twitter, the Follow Friday soup was always seasoned just right. When I would log on, I would see recommendations from my followers telling me who they thought I would be interested in following, and they would tell me what was special about them. They always gave me context and a good reason to at least check out the bios, recent tweets and the profiles of the users they recommended. Deciding whether or not to follow these users was relatively simple.
But then, other chefs came into the kitchen and started pouring salt into the soup.
Instead of a few Follow Friday recommendations that were specific and targeted, now I’m seeing followers recommend every person they follow. There’s no context, no reason given for what makes the recommended people special. It’s just tweet after tweet of packed recommendations in a single tweet, and multiple tweets in a row.
If my favorite restaurant had suddenly begun pouring all the salt into their famous Lentil soup, I would have complained to the management and asked them to have a chat with the chef. If I got no satisfaction from the management, I would abandon the place (or at least the soup) on Fridays.
With Twitter, however, we are the chefs. We are the only ones who can control our desire to pour every follower into our twitstreams. We are the ones who have the power to stop ruining the Follow Friday soup and bring it back to a perfect balance of targeted and specific recommendations.
We are the ones who know who our followers are and what makes them special. Therefore, we are the ones who can recommend with a reason.
We are the ones who have the ability to salt and season the Follow Friday soup without overdoing it.
So, here are a few recommendations to bring Follow Friday back to its perfectly seasoned tasty goodness:
- When you recommend followers for Follow Friday, recommend one to three people at a time. Tell us what makes them special. Tell us why you follow them, and why you think we should follow them as well.
- Don’t recommend every single one of your followers. When you do, it makes me want to unfollow you, just so my twitstream isn’t so cluttered.
- If there’s one of your followers who you want to recommend to a specific follower, recommend them in an @message, again telling them why you think it would be worthwhile for them to follow.
- If you’re not following someone, don’t recommend them. This is a deceptive practice that, as far as I can see, is only used to artificially boost the follow count of the one recommending.