What’s This Follow Friday Thingie?

Written by: Leslie Fishlock // March 27th, 2009 // Uncategorized

Since it is Friday and I am often asked what this “Follow Friday” thingie is, I thought I would just put up a quick post on Follow Friday, or as we denote this on Twitter as #followfriday.

#followfriday is a fun sort of game/Twitter trend to engage people to follow your recommended users and assist others in finding new and interesting Tweeps, or Twitter Peeps. Tweeps are people with a mutual following.

It follows the use of “Hashtags”, which are used to identify a “topic” on Twitter. You simply add # in front of what you want to identify as a topic for search. Other hashtags we use a lot are #GeekGirlCamp when talking about GGC, and a very cool hashtag combination is what we use on StockTwits that denote stock ticker symbols and this is done two ways. First, you may post to the stream by preceding a stock symbol with the $ like this: $AMZN . If you are focusing on a specific symbol, this is the best method to use as it allows us to organize posts according to the stock symbol. Second, if you are making a general comment about the markets or providing market commentary and are not mentioning a specific stock, FX or futures symbol, then enter two dollar signs after a space at the end of your post like this $$ .

With #followfriday, you will be able to find recommended Tweeps that you may want to follow. Others may recommend you and all of a sudden you may suddenly start getting a lot of follows. This is good! It means someone has recommended you enough to others as a person/resource they trust.

As an example, here are some of my suggestions of fellow Geek Girl Speakers: #followfriday @GeekGirlCamp , @NellieDK , @ReikoB , @WritingRoads , @repcor , @LesaFumi , @LaurelA and lots more!

So where do you find the search results for #followfriday ? Simply by going here to the Twitter Search for the topic, you can see everyone who is participating and who they think is worthy of a #followfriday. Or if you use the web version of Twitter, the trending topics and search bar are on the right and you can even create and save your own trending topics.

So who are my #followfriday picks this week? I guess you’ll just have to follow my tweets to see! But, here is a sure bet: @mashable – best social media news updates. Period. And @StockTwits , because I mentioned them here.

Who are your #followfriday picks? List them below so we can all check out some new and interesting Tweeps!