We believe that Follow Friday was created in a genuine and well meaning attempt to provide a semantic, human filtered, recommendation system as well as a general appreciation platform for one’s friends and followers.

Even at the start Follow Friday was open to well-meaning misuse, sometimes quite different than than what we believe to be the destructive abuse that has developed.

The well-meaning misuse involves people attempting to increase their own social reputation through the generosity, or seeming generosity, of making Follow Friday recommendations of “high value follows”.

We all like to give and receive compliments, and ostensibly giving someone a Follow Friday recommendation is a way to do just that. Often people want to be inclusive—so they recommend lots. Most people feel a pressure to reciprocate when they receive a Follow Friday recommendation. Others might simply want to reciprocate. And while many people are genuine about all of this, there are some who are purposefully pimping their stats.

Follower Preselection: Or Why It Doesn’t Work

For a moment let us explore the assumption that the people one chooses to follow are selected purposely, and that having done so acts as a tacit recommendation on the part of the follower. Then in some sense, additional recommendation lists such as Follow Friday would be redundant.

So why are these kinds of list so prevalent? Is the mechanism of tacit recommendation broken or are we all a little less choosy than we should be when composing our twitter networks? Is this reasonably attributable to the change in the twitter game brought about by mass follower gathering by certain users?

Grant points out that since the follow lists are so long and do not provide ratings, as a practical matter, they are not particularly useful for identifying high value follows. We recommend that you consider this tactic: look for interesting people who are engaged with the twitter friends who you respect and/or admire.

Social Media: Experts, Strategists and Coaches

Many people on twitter want to add social media consulting or claims of social media expertise to their little bag of tricks. This is quite prevalent now. Indeed there seems to be a wave of people seeing social media consultancy as something they can just breeze into and use to make money from naive clients.

This ruse is assisted by the fact that it is difficult to prove social media expertise, but rather easy to claim it. One obvious way to lay claim to twitter expertise is to amass a large number of friends and followers. Another is to seek high rankings in the various twitter ranking systems or on twitter leaderboards.

These systems and leaderboards reward twitter account holders with increased scores for certain supposedly valued twitter behaviour. Generosity scores are based partly on the number of retweets that one tweets. Frequent publishing of the @names of others is considered generous as well. It is not hard to realize that retweeting a string of @name recommendations is a generosity ranking bonanza—a huge payoff in just one tweet.

But wait, wait there is more! Since each of the tweet @names is actually a live link to that user’s profile page, these tweets and retweets of a string of @names will also raise one’s all important signal to noise ratio which assumes that all live links have value.

You can see how this practice can be used to raise your twitter rankings, and thereby used to demonstrate your supposed social media expertise.

And, of course the practice has the ancillary benefit of flattering those whose @names are listed in your tweets and retweets as recommendations.

Nothing we have said here about the strategic gaming of rankings to demonstrate social media expertise is meant to understate the fact that rankings also play into our human psyches in ways that feed our human neediness. They are also public making them that much more attractive and thus sometimes a target for stat pimping.

Grant admits to caring about his own rankings and the rankings of others back when they were a more reliable indicator and made “quick glance metrics” worthwhile. He has noticed a significant rise in the number of twitter accounts with 2k-6k followers and a symmetrical follower/following ratio. He no longer believes in using follow/follower symmetry, the number of @replies, or the number of updates as a measure of quality. He believes that for any of the ranking systems to have value, they will have to become more savvy about twitter behaviour and more resistant to artificial manipulation.

Follow Friday’s Dirty Little Secret

Follow Friday’s “dirty little secret” is that very few people actually follow the Follow Friday recommendations. In our experience, even glowing, one person per tweet recommendations from popular and supposedly influential twitter account holders even when backed up with a reason to follow receive very little actual action.

Kay recently had some fun with this fact. One afternoon, as something of a joke, she DEMANDED that her followers immediately follow her buddy @ish. Seven or eight of her followers who were online at the time and are inclined to respond to such mischief actually did give in to Kay’s DEMAND. The clever @ish, a stand-up comedian, dubbed these new followers @KayBallard’s Obeyers, a name the equally clever followers accepted with great grace and humour. It was a brief virtual party complete with virtual pie, And very typical of the brief and fun flights of fancy that occur frequently in the twittersphere.

On twitter We Like to Introduce Individuals to Each Other

We like to introduce individual twitter friends to other individual twitter friends, one at a time as appropriate based on their interests. That kind of follow recommendation has meaning and usefulness. That kind of recommendation has juice and offers real potential for a meaningful conversations and valuable connections.

If you ever follow someone that you learn about through either one of us, please tell us so. That way when opportune we are able to follow up your action to follow with a personal introduction that opens the conversation and is likely to result in a follow back.

We both do this and agree that it has a lot of value but Grant is more inclined to wonder if the twitter paradigm actually supports it. Neither of us supports the creation of a twitter culture that requires such introductions and agree that twitter conversations have an energy and flow of their own and that frequently friendships and connections happen quite naturally. We both like to introduce ourselves by engaging personally when and where we see something of interest. Or, ever the comedians, we like to intrude on occasion to make a funny or clever remark, amusing mostly to ourselves.

It is a cliche, but an apt one: twitter is a Real Time Virtual Cocktail Party. We both find that our offline social skills serve us well at twitter. We believe that reciting lists of follow recommendations would be considered strange and rude behaviour at an offline cocktail party. Arguably, doing so is also strange and undesirable behaviour on twitter—even when validated by the Follow Friday hashtag.

What is at Stake? Why Any of This Matters

Like many of you, we unabashedly love twitter! It is our favourite social media platform—for us, the one that has the secret sauce! We have each made valuable connections and established meaningful friendships through twitter, the friendship between the two of us among them.

Currently time spent at twitter is still a rich experience and twitter continues to be an almost magical place to meet and connect virtually—in real time across miles, time zones and continents, one hundred forty characters at a time.

But sadly for those of us who love it, as twitter rapidly grows, it is undergoing what we consider unfortunate changes. Many have described the changes by saying that twitter is becoming spammier and spammier. What any one individual considers spam might differ. However, most would agree that excessive commercial messages, repeated postings of the same message, and the endless stream of Follow Friday tweets and retweets of Follow Friday tweets, are all examples of annoying clutter.

This spam—this growing deluge of useless tweets—threatens the capacity of twitter and wastes the time of twitter account holders, leading to a loss in their productivity and a much less satisfying user experience.

These changes in the content and quality of the twitter updates or tweets might ultimately have a devastating effect on the nature of the twitter user experience. Or bring about gated or off the grid communities whose more homogeneous nature would surely dilute the rich diversity of the twitter experience.

Currently, twitter is the favoured social networking platform of a high-achieving crowd. That is crucial to its appeal to the the two of us and to similarly situated current and future users. We believe that the fabulously fun and accomplished people that you, and we, would like to meet, connect with, and get to know through our continued and ongoing use of twitter would have little patience for a noisy and cluttered tweet stream and would be unlikely to become or remain twitter users.

And we would hate that!

To add depth to our discourse we have asked some respected individuals to provide us with audio providing their point of view on Follow Friday.

Gennefer Snowfield – Founder & CEO of Acclimedia (aka @Gennefer) gives her insight on relevancy of follower engagement, organic network growth and value based recommendations:

Lucretia Pritt (aka @GeekMommy) speaks to origins of the Follow Friday meme, the social expectations for reciprocity and the deterioration of the meme into its current form:

Aaron Strout descibes some measures to define a social media expert:

Jackie Silver (aka @AgingBackwards) discusses the prospect of not being selective with Follow Friday recommendations:

Daniele Di Gregorio (aka @ikaronet) talks to us about his follow friday experiment and the negative impact on his follower count