Twitter Follow Friday!

by Kris Kelley
(Las Vegas, NV.)

Talk about an “inside baseball” blog post, we’re going to talk about “follow Friday,” a project that Micah Baldwin started a year or so ago to get new people introduced into social circles on Twitter.

Follow Friday has become a bit of a mess to look at on Twitter, because every Friday, many people start posting 140 characters worth of names of people they feel you might benefit from knowing.

My idea: turn Follow Friday into a single tweet with a link to a blog post of the people you think others should follow.

It solves two problems: It gives you more than 140 to talk about the people you recommend, and it also cleans up Twitter so that we don’t watch a stream of @someoneawesome names rushing by all day.

You with me?

Here are some people from my list (and just a few to get the game going):

@Ed – Ed Shahzade is part of the glue of Twitter. He’s a connector and a do-er. He helps people all the time.

@MayhemStudios – Calvin Lee is a great source of information. He scours twitter quite often to find the good stuff and share it out. I learn something from him all the time.

@donmilleris – Don Miller is one of my current author crushes, and he wrote A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, one of my top 2 books for 2010.

@badbanana – Tim Siedell is just plain funny. I love his sense of humor, and he’s totally worth it.

@lmarconi – Lucia Marconi had the guts to tell me she thought I was being a bit egotistical lately, and that she liked my ideas, but sometimes felt put off by my ego. She then wrote a great blog post telling me more ideas. And we had a great back and forth on Twitter. I’m grateful. I can get but-kissing all day long, but she had a constructive, real, solid, non-jealous criticism, and I needed to hear it. Thanks, Lucia.

There you go. That’s a list. It’s just a starter. Make your own. Find the good people. Find people who need the attention. Find people who matter to you. Share the locals. Use public Twitter lists (if the lists are not judgment-based, such as “smart people”).

Promote others. It really does help the system.