Its long been a staple of the Twitterati but there has always been serious flaws with one of the most popular hashtag trends on Twitter.

Follow Friday – often seen as #ff or #followfriday – is a great way to broadcast your favourite users to new followers, and its something I usually partake in myself. It is a way of showing your followers the interesting people that you keep tabs on and is an endorsement that their tweets are well-worth a read.

However, the system is very flawed in the fact that a typical follow Friday post will be the hashtag and usernames (e.g. #ff @jakepjohnson @GradwellTweets), without an explanation as to what the user tends to post about, what they do or why you think they are worth following.

Today I came across a Twitter user who I had come across a few times from various RT. Heather Townsend, known as @efficiencycoach, tweets a simple message of “my #followfriday recommendations for this week” followed by a link to her blog, explaining why these people are worth following, what they’re like as people and why she endorses them, as seen below:

ff

I found this to be a much better than the traditional #ff post as it gave an insight into the users and wasn’t just a list of names. Although Heather’s method of recommendations requires the visitor to follow the link to the blog, it does not require more effort, in fact, it could quicken to process. The traditional process is as follows:

  1. Click on the recommended username
  2. Read 5-10 tweets to get a feel for the personality of the user
  3. Either follow them or go back to the original post and do it all over again

Heather’s method for #ff allows you to find out about more than one recommended user in just one click! Instead of going to several user pages and reading hundreds of tweets, one click gives you snapshots of several users.

It is also better for Heather to post like this because the recommended users can see what Heather thinks of them and why she recommends them. It becomes less of a nod in their direction and more of a testimonial!

I thought it to be such a time saver – and of benefit for those being recommended – that I set up this blog to do the very same next Friday!