If you use Twitter daily (hourly maybe), you’ll probably know about #FollowFriday trend. If not, I suggest you to read this simple introduction by Mashable.
Even if some appreciated twitterers no longer make use of #FF, I believe it is still a good tool to enhance relationships and improve yours and your followers twitter experience.
Writing a good #FollowFriday might be very easy if it is one of your firsts, because surely you got a lot of people to reccomend, lots of new tweeps you want to better engage to and so on. But going forward in your twitter life, following more and more people will probably confuse you about who to recommend.
No endless FollowFridays to recommend everybody. They are completely useless!
I don’t personally like endless #FF, too many tweets are just spam, I believe that people don’t even read all of them and even if they are quoted inside one of them they are not thankful at all. It is good to focus on a single message, clarify you’re actually recommending those people to be followed and, if you got some space left, to explain why you chose them.
We said one message is enough, now it is necessary to focus on who to quote on your #FF. People who RT you? People who you RT? People replying at you or just mentioning your twitter account?
Well, all of them are quite important, and to know who those people are you actually need a Social Analytics tool able to scan your tweets and find your top engaged tweeps.
Using a Social Analytics tool will help you giving metrics to base your followfriday on
In my case Koego worked perfectly to absolve this purpose as it offers a deep distinguish between replies, mentions and retweets (done and received). If you don’t own a Koego account you can register one for free, an invitation code should reach you in a few hours. You also need to setup your twitter account on Koego and then wait till the next morning before you can see your twitter stats.
Once you got access to your account stats the first thing to do in the twitter report is to click on ‘Hide Koego on Stats‘ because if the platform is configured, they will post some of your metrics via twitter so they will probably influence your stats. By hiding, you just get rid of this problem and can focus on real tweeps.
Even if a lot of their twitter report are very interesting we’re just going to focus on 4: Retweets, Replies, Mentions and Mentioning. Even if I think the titles are self explaining I’ll just quickly list their meanings
- Retweets : Match people doing a Retweet to you `RT @yourname some message`
- Replies : Match direct answers/contacts, something like `@yourname some message`
- Mentions : Match everything else related to your account. Eg `some message ( via @yourname ) ` or `some messages @yourname `
- Mentioning : Match your tweets talking about other, so your RTweets, replies and mentions to other people
So all Retweets stats plus half of the Mentions ones are people actually spreading your tweets around their contacts. All the Replies plus half of the Mentions are tweeps answering or asking something directly to you or talking about you with someone else. Finally the Mentioning is you spreading to your contacts the work of the others.
Which one of this three macro-categories is the most important?
As FollowFriday should be just your suggestion about people to follow, the tweeps inside the latest category should be the unique ones to tweet, right? Wrong!
#FF is mainly about socializing. Even if it might sound strange you need to suggest also good retweeters and mentioners, people who actually make your tweets spread in the sphere. Mentioning them in your follow friday is not just a way to thank them but you will also harden your relationship, hopefully reinforcing their inclination to retweet you.
Use FollowFriday to socialize with your followers. Harden your relationships!
So just take the best tweeps of each category, interpolate them and look for example if someone who mention you a lot ( Retweets + Mentions ) is also between the top repliers. Take those people and put them in your followfriday. Friday after friday, even if your top tweeps in each category will probably vary, you might need to go down the ladder, taking the lower positions.
Obviously all this cold stats need to be improved with your own personal experience. While looking at top users, think about their nicks, remember how you interacted with them and try to exclude people you don’t actually like because your followers probably won’t like them too. Instead, emphasize tweeps you remember for some dialog you had or for something you shared together.
Try to interpret the numbers. Put your daily experience above the stats.
Finally, pay a lot of attention to your retweeters before posting. There are lots of bots out there and quoting them on your suggestion won’t make you look such that smart.
Well, I think I trow even too many ideas in this post. Obviously followfriday is not a science and not a matter of mathematics interactions, but the metrics that Koego (or other services) provides may be very useful to decide who to include and who don’t.
