In Quora, the Q&A SNS that is my toy du jour, I replied the following question in a way that I hope will be of use to many – since I know more and more people are looking to tweet more dynamically.  The question, firstly:

When you tweet a #FollowFriday, should you

give a reason why your followers on Twitter

should follow that person or people?

#FF is not particularly powerful.  That said, a simple tweet with #FF or #followfriday and a list of tweeps to follow does not tend to compel many people to follow any of them. A better thing to do, as Dennis Shiao suggested (another person to answer the above question, in Quora) is to theme or qualify the tweeps you are recommending.

Yet better, and sure to be appreciated by nearly everyone you include is, beyond ‘typing’ the tweeps, such as ‘#FF SanFran Scientists @…,’ would be to both compliment and classify – and better yet, suggest the type of twitterers they are. Do this sparingly, such as 1-2 of these per week, and you may find that many of your followers will follow those included in the #FF tweet.

Here are examples:

#FF my #triberr tribespeople @connectyou @rickmans @AyPee @samanthaluy @janetcallaway @jasonyormark @InterviewIQ @Mayakovskij

In that tweet, I thank some core Triberr blog cross-promotion people I work with.

#FF core #KdL group communicators @Fransgaard @SocialGreg @CopyByMac @KevinRiley generous to a fault #in

In that tweet, I thank just a couple people for all they do, and put back into a certain group that is important to me in LinkedIn.

While I could have included more great tweeters, and great KdL group supporters in that tweet, I elected to:

1. keep the tweet at 100 characters, which is well under the 140 characters maximum for a tweet – to allow for retweeting

2. tagged #KdL and also #triberr for inclusion in paper.li:
http://paper.li/tag/KdL
http://paper.li/osakasaul/kansaikoolness
http://paper.li/osakasaul/1292486897

3. tagged #in for inclusion in paper.li (with a large readership):
http://paper.li/tag/in

People may be aware that the hash mark ‘#’ used to ‘tag’ a term is of little meaning in Twitter. It does, however get tweets picked up by other web-based applications, such as the LinkedIn (one of my LinkedIn profiles takes LinkedIn updates from my English tweets that include the #in tag; another profile does the same with my Japanese tweets < from a different twitter account), and paper.li.

Let me know if this helps you?  What do you do, dynamically, with tweets, Facebook and other platform updates, to give support people who support you? Ask me a question in Quora!

About Saul Fleischman

Working with social web apps developers on getting things made: my role tends to be functionality ideation, user experience, and also, marketing communications and community development.

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