#FF on X (formerly Twitter): A Guide to Follow Friday

The Follow Friday tradition started in 2009 when an X (formerly Twitter) user named Micah Baldwin thought it a good idea for everyone to suggest people to follow in tweets, and he decided to make it happen on Fridays and give it the name "Follow Friday." Another user suggested adding the #followfriday hashtag, which other X users later shortened to #ff.

The Purpose of Follow Friday Tweets

The idea of Follow Friday is to suggest who to follow on the social media platform by sharing the usernames of your favorite Twitterers, the people whose tweets you find interesting. It's all about helping people get followers on X and discovering new people to follow.

Follow Friday is an informal, loosely organized system that requires no registration or special formatting to participate. Some consider it a game because it's mainly for fun, although as advertisers discovered the feature and the Twitterverse grew, the community became more detached from the fun feature.

How to Participate in Follow Friday

If you want to participate in Follow Friday, here's what to do:

1. Decide who you want to recommend. It's common to suggest several people at once. Choose X users you think would be interesting to your followers.

2. Write down their X usernames carefully and double-check the spelling.

3. Create a new tweet that starts with a brief introduction followed by the list of usernames you're recommending. Put the @ symbol before each X username and separate the names with a space or comma.

   A typical Follow Friday tweet might be a simple list of usernames that looks like this:

4. At the end of the tweet, insert the #ff hashtag.

5. Send your tweet.

If you have room, include a comment about why other people should follow the folks you recommend. This works best when you recommend only one user or have a common reason for recommending several.

You're more likely to get someone to follow the people you promote with Follow Friday if you give them a reason to visit their X feeds. The more guidance or specificity you offer, the greater the likelihood other people check out your suggestions. It's also a good idea to ground yourself in basic strategies for using the X followers feature.

What Is the Future for Follow Friday?

As X has grown exponentially, the sense of fellowship and community around #FF tweets has grown harder to maintain. Its utility doesn't seem to be as strong as it once was, especially as more commercial use and marketing have mushroomed on X and infiltrated the Follow Friday tweets. Some websites and apps that were set up to promote Follow Friday have gone dark.

All in all, X's #Follow Friday tradition remains popular. It's an international messaging system, so it's not surprising the end-of-week recommendation tradition has become popular around the world.