Why I Don't Do Follow Friday

To you on Twitter, you recognize this term as heralding the weekly day of friends referral in which you post account names to your timeline for others to consider following. Who knows how this started, but it certainly caught on. In the early days of Twitter (or at least in my early days) I was an enthusiastic participant. I've changed my views about it, however, as my number of followers increased.

Twitter, as a social network app, was originally intended to form small groups of "followers" to post updates to one another answering the basic question "What are you doing right now?" As a few trillion people joined the service, this basic concept had the doors blown off it as people (either through direct actions or by force of their celebrity) garnered thousands, even millions of followers. I have always sought to use Twitter as a means of communicating directly with people. This obviously becomes impractical, even impossible, if you have a few hundred thousand followers. Communicating with everybody is impossible, so of course some sort of selection or culling has to take place. This is where Follow Friday gets a little problematic. Let's say you have a thousand avid followers. Of these thousand, let's assume that 100 of them actively seek interchange with you. While you may be able to keep up with this many tweets as long as they don't all come in at the same time. It's kind of hard to say that you're really in communication with them, at least not on any kind of personal level. So, along comes Follow Friday, and you find yourself in the business of recommending people to others for following. Do you:

a) Recommend all 100 of them, being egalitarian? If so, all 1,000 of your followers will see that you have selected 100 of them, possible offending the other 900. At 140 characters per tweet, you will also flood your timeline, and that of your followers, with tweet after tweet of recommended account names.

b) Cherry pick the 15 or so that you really communicate with (either through @replies or DMs). This can really look snobby if not handled really well.

c) Select just one or two a week for really special reasons (offending the other 9,999 who are wondering why they aren't special).

d) or simply not engage in FF. Which is what I do. And which can also look snobby if others are recommending you and you're not returning the favor. In this regard, it can be a lot like Christmas cards (and about as sincere).

I have chosen option D, at least for now. I think in the long run, I'd rather not get into the cherry picking business at all. My favorite tweeters are those that engage me, and there are simply too many of them to refer each Friday. I guess I'd rather run the risk of offending all a little bit than offending some a lot.

I appreciate everyone who follows me. Moreover, I appreciate everyone who engages me by reading and responding to what I write. But Follow Friday has taken on the aspect of Mother's day where you are expected to show your love and gratefulness or risk offending mom. I always like my mom's view of Mother's day. 'I'd rather you showed that you loved me the other 364 days a year and not make Hallmark rich on this one day". I hope that in some way, through my tweets, I'm showing everybody who engages me that I appreciate them, and I hope they know that I implicitly recommend them all without having to prove it once a week. To me, your follower count is not a popularity contest. It's also not a marketing tactic. They are people that have chosen to "listen" to me, and the number of them is the least significant thing in the world to me. Each one is of value. Follow them all!

Later,
Jim