What if you didn’t know who to follow on TwitterTwitter? Would you randomly start following people? Would you follow people you see mentioned by those you already follow? most likely you would ask your friends for recommendations since you can trust that your friends will suggest people who are worth following. which is exactly how FollowFriday began.

In mid-January, FollowFriday began with a simple tweet:

The idea is to think of interesting people you already follow and recommend them to others.

Mykl Roventine suggested the hashtag #followfriday, and a few friends (Chris Brogan, Erin Kotecki Vest, Aaron Brazell and Jim Kukral) helped spread the word. on the first FollowFriday, there were almost two #followfriday tweets per second at its peak.

#FollowFriday: The Trend that kept Trending

Then late the next Thursday night, suddenly #followfriday tweets began to appear in foreign languages! it seemed that FollowFriday was back. Now, every Friday, people suggest other people to follow. Here is a chart of the hours that #followfriday trended each week since it began:

What’s interesting is not that #followfriday trends for the full Friday each Friday, but that the bottom of the spikes have begun to spread out. Meaning that #followfriday is beginning to spread into Thursdays and Saturdays, US time. in other words: #followfriday is international.

Why #FollowFriday Works

FollowFriday is successful because of three main factors:

1. It’s easy. it takes little effort to send a tweet, something people do dozens of times a day.

2. It’s participatory. You don’t need to be part of the “Twitterati” to participate. You can suggest one person or 100 people. You can get endorsements from one person or a hundred people.

3. It’s karmic and it feels good. It’s a great feeling to simply say, “I think this person is great. You should follow them.”

#FollowFriday Tools & Resources

Some great sites have begun to crop up around the concept of FollowFriday. Scott Lemon created a site called TopFollowFriday.com which analyzes who is “endorsing” and who is being “endorsed.”

Brian Roy collected thousands of tweets on FollowFriday and determined that more than 32,342 recommendations were made and more than 16,083 Twitter users were recommended. Now Brian has a tracker to follow FollowFriday (you can also track FollowFriday on Twitter Searchtweetzi Twitter Search). even Jesse Stay of SocialToo has begun to look at reporting on FollowFriday statistics at the user level within his product.

Simply, FollowFriday is a strong example of a crowdsourced recommendation engine, which will always provide better results than an automated one. Twitter Grader, for example, currently lists Guy Kawasaki as the #1 Twitterer (as opposed to #28 on TopFollowFriday), and only 2 Twitterers in its top 25 have less than 10,000 followers. With the addition of trust, recommendation systems tend to excel over purely algorithmic systems. Of course, like any system, FollowFriday has its faults. there are no categories, nor ranking systems or even a guarantee that you will actually like following the people recommended.

Twitter has recently begun to make waves around becoming a search engine that allows for quick understanding of a topic or delivering an immediate response. in many ways, FollowFriday shows what happens when the Twitter community is asked a direct question: “Who do you think your friends should follow?”

What’s Next for #FollowFriday?

It will continue to be what it is, a crowdsourced recommendation engine for Twitter followers. it will occur weekly and spawn similar efforts (my personal favorite is #woofwednesday). Beyond that, FollowFriday shows that there is a real need for trusted content (or people) discovery, and that, on some level, a crowdsourced recommendation engine does serve that purpose. Twitter could realize the power of the people that use its product to create revenue streams and opportunities by simply using the product as intended.

What are you doing? I’m suggesting people follow @mashable, who has been a huge supporter of #followfriday. How about you?

Micah Baldwin is VP and Lead Evangelist for Lijit Networks, a search widget that allows a blogger to make all of their social content (FlickrFlickr, Twitter, YoutubeYouTube, etc.) and some trusted sources searchable from one place, their blog, demonstrating the bloggers expertise and influence. Lijit also offers detailed search stats and an ad network. he can be found on Twitter and at his own blog at LearntoDuck. Micah will be speaking at SXSW on Content Discovery.

More Twitter resources from Mashable:

- Pro Cycling on Twitter: 48 People who Aren’t Lance Armstrong
- Twitter Professors: 18 People to Follow for a Real Time Education
- HOW TO: Build Community on Twitter
- The 10 Users You’ll Meet on Twitter
- FOLLOW FAIL: The top 10 Reasons I Will Not Follow You in Return on Twitter

#FollowFriday: The Anatomy of a Twitter Trend