Knowing who you should follow and getting recommendations and insights from the network of people you follow is important in making twitter more valuable to you and your business use of twitter.

Every Friday on Twitter there is a phenomenon called “Follow Friday”. Basically people will tweet who they recommend that people should follow. Think of it as a lightweight recommendation or endorsement activity engine. This will help you to find and follow the people that you want in your network of connections.

Here are 7 Best Practices to use when engaging in Follow Friday on Twitter.

1. Use the hash tag (the pound sign # = hash tag) and include this in the body of your tweet #followfriday

2. Recommend people who you think are worthy of following and that your network would benefit from following and connecting with them.

3. Break out your #followfriday tweets by some sort of category if possible. For example I might recommend people that are great analysts, engineers, foodies, artists, software developers, branding or marketing executives by specifically stating in my tweet why you should follow them.

4. Use Follow Friday to give back value to your followers network and reward the people that you respect and whose tweets you find valuable. Make sure you include the @ before the name so that people can easily click to that users profile page.

5. One of the keys of all social networks is that you have to give to get. So give and share the brain trust of people that you think are deserving of it. It will come back to you in the form of more loyal and engaged network!

6. Watch for your network to recommend people via Follow Friday and you can discover some real gems and make connections quickly. Pay special attention to the people that you respect.

7. Don’t blindly follow everyone that is recommended. Allocate a few minutes and check out the bio and tweets from the recommended people before you decide to follow those recommendations.

Here is a sample #followfriday tweet and an effective way to communicate who you are recommending and why.

Happy Following! FYI you can follow me at @Rumford