As one of Twitter’s most popular, long-standing Twitter memes, #FollowFriday is based on a noble premise: recommending Twitter users that other people should follow. However, it’s gotten out of control. It’s become cluttered, spammy, and annoying.
I don’t follow people based solely on someone’s #followfriday recommendation. Neither does anyone else.
When Twitter was young, #followfriday was a great way to discover interesting people that your friends were following. Now, it’s become an overused outlet for self promotion and pandering to individuals that retweet, follow, or mention you — regardless of how interesting your actually think they are. It’s also become exhausting to anyone who goes to the trouble each friday to thank the individuals that recommend them.
#followfriday has lost its mojo. And, related hashtags such as #Top,#FollowSaturday. #FollowSunday, #FollowMonday, #FollowTuesday, #FollowWednesday, #FollowThursday, #FollowNow, #FollowEveryDay, #MustFollow, and #FollowerOfTheDay have lost their mojo too. People are using them to recommend droves of users — not just the undiscovered ones that stand out.
That’s why i was encouraged when Klout introduced +K last month as a way for social network users to reward peers that influence them. +K provides a way for social networkers to identify the people that influence them in moderation – it only allows individuals to reward +K to five individuals each day. You can’t distribute +K en mass.
When you reward +K, you can let everyone know how an individual has influenced you by sharing your +K distribution on Twitter or Facebook. Or, better yet, you can keep it to yourself and let others discover how you’ve influenced them when they visit their Klout profile.
“At Klout, we believe influence is the ability to drive action,’ said Chris Makarsky on Klout’s official blog. “We also believe influence is temporal — that is, you constantly need to drive action in order to remain influential in a topic. We believe the +K system stays true to those ideals.”
The +K system also provides a model for individuals participating in #followfriday: 1) everyone using the #followfriday or a related hashtag should limit their follow recommendations to no more than five individuals; 2) participants should award +K to each individual they recommend; and 3) participants should explain WHY they’re recommending someone else.
If we do this, #followfriday can become something that we look forward to again. #followfriday will have meaning again.
How to Follow Someone
VideoJug presents a sneaky guide to following someone down the street without them noticing.
Credits: Cartoon by Rob Cottingham of Noise to Signal.
About Troy Janisch