A warning: if you’re not familiar with Twitter and do not currently use it, this post will be lost upon you. I advise you to first read the twitter manual.

If you are a heavy Twitter user, and you are a fan of the meme, #followfriday, raise your hand. If you didn’t raise your hand, I believe it’s not because the meme itself is a noisemaker and a complete waste, but the way people are USING it, is sometimes…well, annoying.

You see, #followfriday is like a tribute – if you really like someone’s tweets, in particular, you pay tribute to them on a Friday, by telling all your followers that they should, too, follow this person.

This is much like social etiquette IRL, in that if you tell a group of friends they should also be friends with your new friend Sally because she just installed a new home theater, of course they’re going to welcome Sally into the group, and become friends with her in hopes of being invited to her next Super Bowl party. And Sally is going to be grateful to you for hooking her up with all these new friends that she wouldn’t have met without your help.

However, if you introduce your group of friends to 1,000 people at once and tell them to be friends with them for no particular reason, your current group of friends is not going be able to keep track of all those people, or have any good reason to befriend them. Likewise, the 1,000 people that you are trying to introduce won’t get any real value from this introduction, and therefore won’t remember you or have cause to be thankful.

Here’s a case in point:

This person has listed (two tweets in a row!) all the people he feels are worthy of following. But what good is this doing anyone? Where is the value?

Here is another example of #followfriday, but this time the person tweeting is giving a good REASON to follow someone on Twitter:

In this example, @thehrgoddess has accomplished a few things: First, she’s established a reason for following @ldguymn – for the great leadership content of his tweet.

Secondly, she is using two memes, #leadership and #followfriday, to get her name out there for people who follow the memes. (After all, that’s how I found these people, I wasn’t following them initially!)

Thirdly, she’s established a direct one-on-one connection with @ldguymn, because he can see that she singled him out. His reply?

So ultimately, as we all know, Twitter is about building relationships. This is just one of many, many ways to make the most of our experience.

What are some other good uses you have seen of #followfriday?