Why Should I Follow You This Friday?

This has been on my mind for a while and I think it's significant enough to deserve its very own post, not just a bullet point in a general Twitter post.

Follow Friday is a weekly event on Twitter. Twits post tweets containing the #FF hashtag followed (or preceded) by the usernames of people they follow/who follow them as a way of getting everyone more followers.

Only in these modern times would a sentence like that make sense.

Anyway, most Follow Friday tweets look like this:

#FF @alannayes @beckybanks @calliemiller @darthvader @elissajanine @faustfatale @goodreads @hmarieadkins @indianajim @jayewells @kevinism

That's great, I guess, because it gets a lot of names in there... but it doesn't tell me anything about why I should follow those people.

I'm much more likely to follow someone mentioned in a Follow Friday tweet if I know why the Twit thinks I should follow him. So a better tweet would look like this:

#FF @alannayes because he knows what a smilodon is; @beckybanks because she compares cars to panthers; @calliemiller for liking Ratatouille.

My eyes skate right over tweets full of @usernames and I don't read them, but I do read that second tweet. Those are the #FF tweets I post. I may not recommend as many tweeps as the first kind of tweet, but, to me, it has more value.