Are you #WorthaF?

I'm a copywriter living in England. I'm pretty new to all this, having started my blog - Incense and Peppermints - just a few months ago. I love to write, hence my profession, but it's very liberating to babble-on about anything that takes my fancy through the blog, alongside the commercial work that provides a daily challenge and income. And then there's the comments my blog has netted... incredibly rewarding. So many people taking time to say they enjoyed the post. What took me so long to enter the blogosphere? I'm also a mum of two children. I try not to talk about them too much. And fail. I hope you enjoy my work, and thanks to Guestblogme for the platform.

Are you #WorthaF?

Update (14th August) : #WorthaF went through its first Follow Friday today and I saw over 100 uses of the tag. A great debut I think! A fair few were mine, I admit, but so many from others. So THANKS to everyone who did it. Hope it worked for you all. Suprise, delighted, amazed - that was me today.

I think the On Friday element worked too, so maybe the strategy of "stash your top tweets in Favourites all week and RT on Friday with the #worthaF tag" is the way to go?

Anyway, the original blog on #worthaF...

You might have noticed, I don’t do Follow Friday on Twitter. I fell-out with it a while ago for lots of reasons, which you are welcome to read about here in my first post Follow Friday Can Bugger Off.

In that initial post I put forward an alternative to Follow Friday of collecting the best tweets your saw that week in your Favourites folder, and on Friday telling your followers to go look in your Favourites by tweeting the link http://twitter.com/Angpang/favourites.

But that’s not working for me right now.

Firstly, because my Twitter honeymoon period is over. I am now in the happily married phase; I’m there, but I’m not obsessed. Real life is being attended to more and I’m not on Twitter often enough to collect Tweets in Favourites so efficiently.

(For an excellent post on Twitter as a romance do pop over to read Debra Snider’s ATwitter when you have a moment).

Secondly, let’s be honest, Follow Friday is also I 'Heart' You Friday. People are blowing kisses at each other as much as trying to pimp their follower lists. If you Favourite someone’s tweet, they don’t automatically know about it, as they do when their @name is broadcast on your Follow Friday list. No one wants to blow a kiss and not have it land.

Last Friday I watched @Gibbzer (an advocate of my Favourites approach who really is worth a Follow) take her Favourite tweets and re-tweet them along with a tiny message that sort of said ‘you should follow this person, just have a look at this brilliant Tweet they did…’ and I thought

‘ooh follow recommendations through the medium of retweeting, I like that, that’s the way to go’.

So I’m going to follow Gibbzer’s lead.

My take on it will be adding a short & sweet hashtag and doing it anytime, not just Friday.

At the moment I'm thinking of the hashtag #worthfollowing or (because it's short, descriptive and cheeky) #worthaF. Should other people take this up, it's easy to search with a hashtag and see other recommendations.

And my reasoning for doing this anytime of any day is because I might not be on Twitter on Friday, because the recommendation will stand out more, and because I like to do stuff on the spur of the moment.

So, an example (pay attention):

#worthaF RT @thingy blah blah [wonderful tweet] blah blah

And if you’re jaded with Follow Friday like me, I invite you to chuck a few out there. I would love to search #worthaF and come across lots of recommendations by clever people, yes, people like YOU.

And if you don't like hashtags and feel they're the Twitter equivalent of dancing to The Birdie Song (by The Tweets, I have just discovered, now there's appropriate), you don't have to use any: put your own spin on it. But I didn't need to explain that to you, did I?

If you do give it a go, pick short tweets if you can or you'll have to faff about editing them. Or you could use (as @Nikki Dee says) www.twitlonger.com.

I am not looking to overthrow Follow Friday. And if you do FF and enjoy it, carry on. It's just not working for me. I want an alternative that's all ice-cream and no wasps.

As ever, let me know your thoughts.

And that photo of Monroe blowing a kiss is by Weegee, fascinating photographer, read more at Weegee's World.

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