Taking Back FollowFriday the Chris Brogan Way

Earlier today Chris Brogan tweeted about an idea he had regarding the Twitter FollowFriday Trending Topic and a cool way to give props to the cool people you follow on Twitter and Turn Twitter’s Follow Friday in Blog Traffic at the same time. Curious? Read on to see how you can join the movement to take back FollowFriday on Twitter, Chris Brogan style!

In essence, the idea involves creating a blog post that highlights the folks you’d like to recommend for FollowFriday and linking to it from a status update that get’s posted to Twitter like the one from Chris Brogan below:

A Quick Note About FollowFriday

The point of FollowFriday is to mention someone you’re friends with and why you think they are the cats meow, thus “introducing” them to your followers and helping forge new connections and help build relationships in your social circle. Of late though, the problem is that all too often FollowFriday Twitter status updates contain little more than a list of names followed by a hashtag making them of little or no use at all.

Count Me In

Originally @ADSMitchell, @VSellis and I had agreed to lobby for better quality FollowFriday Twitter updates by including only one user per update, a reason to follow them and the #FF or #FollowFriday hashtag (and getting our friends to do the same), but I prefer this “post and tweet” approach to FollowFriday for several reasons:

• It’s a great way to put the users you recommend in context as you’re no longer restricted to 140 characters.
• Your message more meaningful to followers and invites interaction outside of the Twitter community in general.
• It’s extra (and original) content for your blog, which is community focused and generates goodwill.
• If used effectively , it could be used to produce link worthy content (think top 10 lists and link bait).

Moving Swiftly Along

So, look out for my new FollowFriday posts, featuring some of my favourite friends from Twitter. (Who knows? Maybe your mug will be in one of them!)