If you follow us on Twitter (@VitaminOC) you know that we love #FollowFriday because we like recognizing people and organizations that give us feedback, interact with us, or are doing good things in OC.

What is #FollowFriday?

Every Friday, tagging a tweet with #FollowFriday or #FF is a way to share with your Twitter followers someone that you think they should follow as well. Usually it is someone that you have built a relationship with online, someone that you want to highlight, or simply someone that is new to Twitter and you want them to get some new friends.  (More details: #FollowFriday- The Anatomy of a Twitter Trend)

What do we like about #FF?

#FF is awesome because it’s a fun way to help everyone find interesting users. We enjoy reading all of your #FF recommendations and many of the people we follow in @VitaminOC have resulted from a #FF endorsement.

We highly encourage you to share your recommendations on #FF because we can all learn a little about each other and create a bigger OC community. Plus it cuts the time of searching for valuable people that may have the same interests as you.

So, what is wrong with #FF?

We have noticed in our Twitter stream that on #FF people are starting to tweet out a list of 5-6 people without  giving a real reason on why to follow them. By doing this, it’s just a bunch of names that get lost in the #FF tweets. (we don’t want you to spam your followers! eek!)

For example, we have seen tweets that look similar to this:

[this is not from our actual stream, just an example of what we are talking about]

We want to know why should we follow these people? Are they doing great things in their community? Do their tweets make you laugh? Do they work or go to school with you? Are they car aficionados?  Do they have an interesting blog? Are they new to Twitter and need  friends? Are they the biggest @kogibbq fan that you know? haha!

It doesn’t matter what your recommendation is!  One thing that we have learned from Twitter is that we can all have pretty obscure interests and still find another person that shares that interest with us.

What are we doing different?

So in the spirit of bringing back the true value of #FF we are going to recommend an OC #FF person/company/ brand/ organization on Twitter and tell you on VitaminOC why we think they are valuable.

What do you think?

We are going to begin with our new way of #FF this week. We welcome all types of feedback and response, so let us know what we can do to provide more value.