A new hashtag. #worthaF.
Why thank you. That's very kind. Errr, what? Is this some new Follow Friday thing?
Well, it didn't take much hunting (OK, I clicked on the hashtag) to find out what was going on and trace it back to the source, the cannot-be-easily-summarized @Angpang, and very shortly the pieces began to fall into place. It is indeed a suggestion for a #followfriday replacement, which, after about your first month or so on Twitter, you realize is a wonderful idea which is sadly, notoriously broken. It is spam bait, it is noisy, it is horrendously devalued by those who wish to game the system, and, at times, it can be plain annoying. There are those who play the game nicely, wonderfully in fact, crafting beautiful tweets as to why you should follow a particular person, keeping their recommendations to just precisely those people who deserve them - but they're always drowned out by the spambots, the thoughtless retweeters,
It is, however, sadly addictive to do #followfriday. We all have our down days. Being told by a bunch of people (or even robots) that you're great and worth following sometimes feels worth something. You feel compelled to respond, to return the favor. It's a terrible, terriible drug, that encourages abuse. It's resisted several months of attempts to reinvent it, but maybe #worthaF is the way to do it. Angela's article and the way the tag was used on its first day out explain it perfectly; I'm not going to go through it all again. So what makes me think this is a decent idea that's worth a shot? To find out, we'll have to strip it all down; delve deep into the anatomy of the tweet, of Twitter, and of us users ourselves. Just remember, it's
#worthaF RT @whoever [their beautiful original tweet]
and let's take a look what's good about it!
The tag
Let's be honest, it's inherently racy. Nothing wrong with that at all, it's what makes the world go round, but it's what makes it memorable. It's also surprisingly unique - Google it, and you'll find that uses of it and descriptions of it are already coming in way up the search list. It's brief and to the point - this person is worth a F(ollow). Irresistible. What's more, it's only going to end up costing you a total of nine characters over a regular retweet.
The retweet
The established way of giving props to your peeps, a retweet is by far the best way to encourage a friend and spread the word to others about just how great they are. Quality retweeting has, in itself, been suggested as a better way of doing #followfriday - and it is certainly possible to do that way, although there's a significant number of spambots out there that are in the retweet game. Things get even better when you consider that mnost Twitter clients have retweet capability built in; even Twitter itself is about to add it. RT's are well-woven into the fabric of the Twitter universe. The Twitter pros (in other words, people who can count) know a good way to encourage retweets is to keep their own tweets short, leave room for the RT sauce.
The target
Simple enough. Just one person. There was nothing to stop you doing single-person #followfriday's before (I have received some delightful ones where the recommendation used the rest of the tweet to describe me in glowing terms), but it's far too easy to stretch a #ff to eight or nine people with some blanket words like "wonderful tweeps", or even ten or eleven amnd forget the reason entirely. That, above all, is what makes Follow Friday croak. The RT format here pretty much compels you into single-person recommendations. They mean so much more. They're also a lot harder for the spam brigade to take advantage of. (A single tweet by a single human, recommending a single human, has far greater personal value for the folks involved. Far less marketing value for the 'bots). Most important, think of it as blowing a kiss to your recipient, as Angela pointed out. You want to make sure your recipient knows they got it, without it being buried in some lurid ball of bodies.
The tweet
This one is the big one for me. There have been plenty of twitter tropes lately about it being a "theater for the mind", a "verbal gym", a place where you live purely by your wits, armed with only 140 characters. What defines our identity in Twitter space is simply what we say. (If you are picking your followers based on avatars, you are definitely in the wrong place). All my relationships - oh yes, as far as I'm concerned, my Twitter friends are as real as any others I have - are based purely on the sum total of what those people have said to me, to others, and to all. To recommend someone in their own words is the highest compliment you can make. You're literally saying "Look at this person. This is the sort of thing they say here. This is why they're worth my time, and worth yours."
The timing
Twitter isn't like much of the Internet. It has a compelling real-time dimension - the bit that you never realize until you try it - that takes it over and above much of the rest of the Web, even the other social networking sites. Nothing is as satisfying as a conversation that snowballs into interactions firing in all directions. As such, timing your RT just right can make a big difference. There's not much point retweeting any of the big guys within a few seconds - most of your followers already saw it too; likewise, you probably don't want those wonderful words to wait until Friday, either. This one's still an open question - whether to leave your #worthaF calls to 'traditional' Friday, or scatter them throughout the week, but, again, it's your RT. Your call.
Wait!
That's the entire #worthaF tweet covered. Could this solution possibly be as good as it looks? I honestly think it could. The first ones I saw today (Friday August 14) honestly went really well. I encourage you to give it a go. Next time you see that tweet, the one that reminds you, hey, that exactly sums up this person, why I like them, why I follow them - save it somewhere for a RT, maybe now, maybe later. Add that tag, give it a try. Promote this to your friends; the good ones, the interactive ones. Maybe @mashable will pick up on this; some big gun support would make all the difference.
And maybe, just maybe, we can make Follow Friday #worthaF.
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