050109: Twitter Follow Friday

Dr. Rus — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:17:58 +0000

#FollowFriday On Twitter

Friday on Twitter is known as #FollowFriday. In case you’re not aware of what Twitter is, let me give you a brief description before I go any further.

Twitter is a social networking site. Actually, it’s better known as a microblog because you’re limited to 140 characters per tweet. Instead of filling up this entire post with links scattered throughout, at the end of the post I will give all the links in one place. So, you can read this brief description here, without feeling the need to click on a link. But, you will want to do so later on at the end of this post.

I discovered Twitter a long time ago. I’m not really sure when I joined, but I know I was one of the early adopters. But then again, I usually like to try out new things as soon as they hit the Internet. I played around for a while, but wasn’t really sure what added value Twitter brought to my Internet use. However, as time went on, I started discovering some great new friends. It’s a social network for people to connect on many levels. While some use it solely as a marketing tool, there’s much more to it than that. As a matter of fact, while many marketers may have big numbers for followers, they seldom interact, and for me, I usually ignore their requests for me to follow them. I’m not interested in an endless stream of marketing information.

I’m looking for interaction.

So, how does one find interesting people to follow on Twitter? That’s where #FollowFriday comes in. Usually every Friday people simply tweet out a list of @people they’re following. In other words, it’s a recommendation from one person to follow another person. Over the past few weeks, #FollowFriday has resulted in a lot of noise as people simply send out endless lists of @friend suggestions. I’ve actually started ignoring many of them because I simply don’t have time to look over every suggested person.

What to do, what to do, what to do?

A New Way For #FollowFriday

Just how should we handle the noise of #FollowFriday on Twitter? That’s where this blog post comes in. It’s also where I need to introduce Steve Woodruff, also known as @swoodruff on Twitter. Earlier this week he made a suggestion to start giving not only more information about those we’re suggesting as good people to follow. But he also suggested writing a blog post too. You can read his full post on his StickyFigure blog at Improving Follow Friday. It’s well worth the read, and it’s also a great suggestion.

So, using Steve’s suggestion for Improving Follow Friday, I will start doing a blog post with my weekly suggestions. Along the way, I will also give Twitter user friendly suggestions too.

My #FollowFriday Suggestions for May 1/09

First off, if you don’t have a Twitter account and you’re reading this post, it’s really easy to set up an account. Simply head on over to the Twitter site and set up an account. It’s really easy, and before you know it, you’ll be having a blast interacting with people from all over the world.

My first suggestion for #FollowFriday

Swoodruff – Made this great Twitter suggestion

In the coming weeks I will categorize my followfriday suggestions. This week, my followfriday suggestions fall into the category of People Who Make Me Laugh.

And in the spirit of not wanting to leave out a few important people on this my first #followfriday Twitter list…

People I interact with on a daily basis…

There you go! Happy Twitter following!
Dr. Rus

Fellow Sojourner » Twitter

050109: Twitter Follow Friday