Avoid Unfollow Monday - Do Your Follow Friday's Right!
Twitter is a microblogging platform that allows users to answer a simple question: "What are you doing?' You have 140 characters to say what you want to say with every update. Each update is called a "tweet". I have used twitter successfully to build a medium sized group of people who follow the updates about my personal life, project management and the PMP exam.
But every Friday I have to shake my head when I see how people manage to get Follow Friday totally wrong.
Follow Friday is one of the most popular Twitter activities - it is a weekly event on Fridays where everyone suggests other Twitter users to follow. In other words, you recommend people that you think your followers should also follow. This is a great way for you to help others grow their network
So why is everyone doing it absolutely, utterly, totally and supercalifragilisticexpialidociously wrong by posting tweets like the following:
FollowFriday @projectshrink @THE_REAL_SHAQ @bullyblends @dennisstevens @booktalk @brianbuck @corneliusficht @scottlaw1 @PMForum @razzaque
If you give me a list of 10-15 Twitter users that you think I should follow then you are wasting my time. This approach seems to me that you are taking the easy way out by simply listing 10 "random" names of twitter users. Granted, you may have put some thought into this, but I can't tell. It's just a list of names.
To show you what I mean let me ask you this: Would you do the same thing at a party? Would you just come up to me and say "Hey Cornelius, you must talk to the following 10 people here tonight - him, her, him, her, him, her, him, her, her and him. Bye now!"
The answer is: No.... you wouldn't do that. You would come up to me and say "Cornelius, I want you to meet someone. Follow me and I'll introduce you to Susan over there. I like what she has to say and I bet that you will find value in her thoughts, too."
That is why I have changed the way I do my FollowFriday tweets: I'm giving you one person per tweet and I include a reason why you should follow them.
Judge for yourself... which of the following would you be more likely to follow:
The old way:
- Follow Friday: @CoachM @thelazypm @PM-StrayDogg @pmstudent
The new way:
- Follow Friday: Margaret Meloni is @CoachM who inspires with her tweets & will lighten your day. Especially if you are working with jerks...
- Follow Friday: Peter Taylor aka @thelazypm - He tweets about how to be "productively lazy" on your projects. Some tweets are on dinosaurs.
- Follow Friday: @PM_StrayDogg (Dan Strayer) - He knows how to ride a Camel - and he can manage projects, too!
- Follow Friday: Are you starting out in Project Management? Need direction? Let @pmstudent guide you. Experts are welcome, too!
Yes, it's more work because you actually have to use your brain (instead of just the copy/paste function). But it shows your followers that you care, that you know the people you are recommending and and that you actually put some thought into your recommendations.
So join the revolution and tell my WHY I should follow your Friday recommendations!
Please do your part and RT this post followers - just copy paste this text into twitter and click Update: Avoid Unfollow Monday - Do Your Follow Friday's Right! http://bit.ly/o2tlj