How to Follow Friday on Twitter

Step 1: Understand Twitter

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging site. It allows you to send 140 character messages called "tweets" to a group of people who have elected to follow you and receive your messages. You can tweet through more than 50,000 applications on third-party applications. Twitter was designed to be portable and to work on short message service or SMS.² All you really need to be able to tweet is a basic cellphone that is capable of sending and receiving the widely used SMS text messages. Twitter's portability enables following people on Twitter to be a real-time social activity.

Step 2: Use Hashtags

Placing a hashtag (#) in front of a term allows it to be tracked by other members of the Twitter community. Placing the term #followfriday within a tweet will allow that tweet to be tracked in one of several ways. You can use hashtags.org to track all the tweets that include given hashtags that have been tweeted by users who are followed by hashtags.org. If you follow @hashtags, Hashtags.org will follow you back. Any tweets you make including #followfriday will now be tracked by hashtags.org. You can also go to www.hashtags.org and search for a list of #followfriday tweets.

Step 3: Recommend Users on Follow Friday

In order to recommend a user on Follow Friday, you just tweet their Twitter name with the #followfriday hashtag.³ For example #followfriday @Lons will let your followers know that you think Lon Harris is worth following. You can include more than one user in a Follow Friday tweet, so you could tweet #followfriday @Lons @whitehouse @cnn to recommend multiple users. It's fine to use all 140 characters in your Follow Friday tweet. If you have a number of users to recommend, it's acceptable to do more than one Follow Friday tweet, although you don't want to spam your followers. If you overwhelm them with Follow Friday tweets, they may unfollow you.