#FollowFriday: Dead Or Alive?

Update: There was some problem with the original post’s meta (read I goofed up while tinkering around with Wordpress) and now the old link is dead. I’m re-posting the same content here, though comments, pingpbacks and re-tweet data have been wiped out. Sorry!

Imagine this: you take the same bus to work everyday. You spend a good one hour, sitting, looking out the window, reading a book, chatting up your neighbour, immersing yourself into an experience called the bus-ride. And you notice something else: that on Mondays, most commuters carry RED umbrellas. Yep, red umbrellas. In the heat of summer, in the rains, during spring and when its biting cold.

Red umbrellas? Mondays? Hmmm. You are getting curious by the day. What do you do?

Well, something like this has been happening to me. Where the bus ride is akin to the time I spend on Twitter and the red umbrella is the phenomenon of FollowFriday. It occurs regularly and yet wrapping my head around what it does, who’s doing it and why, was getting difficult. Then a simple thought said: ask, you dim-wit, ask the community the whats and whens.

So I did. And here’s the lowdown

How many clicked on the survey link: 363

How many responded: 85 (23%)

What did they say:

Question 1:

Do you recommend people on FollowFridays?

Turns out people do, but not religiously. 40% respondents recommend ‘once in a while’ while 22% said they never do it. Here’s all the responses:

Question 2:

What benefits, according to you, come out of a FollowFriday recommendation?

Repondents could select as many choices as possible to answer this question and they did! 45% stated validation as a Twitter community member. Interestingly, 29% also said it was all for fun and that they didn’t see any perceived benefit

Question 3:

Have you seen an increase in following after one or many FollowFriday recommendations?

If its called Followriday, I’m guessing the operative word is ‘follow’ right? I wanted to know if people who had been recommended actually witnessed an increase in their following. 47% said, yes their following increased marginally after one or many FollowFriday recommendations. Marginal is subjective, but heartening to know that the idea works for most!

Question 4

Do you think FollowFriday is dying out?

No offence to @micah (he started the FollowFriday trend in January, read more about that on Mashable) or anyone else, but there’s been some talk (tweet?) about FollowFriday losing its edge. So this question was to get a sense of people’s stickiness with the phenomenon. Interestingly while 34% said it will die out slowly, 31% said…. who cares?

So there we go. A little insight into one of the many things Twitter is unique for. I understand this survey could have been designed better, but I’m learning as I go. Hope you enjoyed it. I’d also like to thank the following for helping spread the word about the survey:

@parvathiom @fridayluv @aslammemon @dina @surekhapillai @paradoxed @vijaysankaran @rfmf24×3 @neobluepanther @vedantvarma @nadhiyamali @thomaswigington @dharshana @cheth @Gauravonomics @ManiKarthik @maheshmurthy @Netra @mohdabdurraafay

Your thoughts…?

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