Last week I was all excited because I had 15 Follow Friday (#FF) shout outs on Twitter. When all was said and done it actually turned out to be more like 17.

I thought that was totally impressive and it blew me away, but this week’s #FFs annihilated last week’s number. It set a new record. One I’m not sure will be touched for quite a while.

33!

SHAZAM! (And that wasn’t including the few people who for whatever reason #FF’d me more than once, or RT’d other #FFs that had @HauntJaunts in them.)

What happened to make it spike so much? Do I even know? As a matter of fact, I do.

I was well on my way to at least getting close to last week’s number on my own. I had 12 #FFs when I checked early on in the a.m. But when I checked back later around noon…whoa. I saw a slew more. And my followers number had leapt up too!

All because Autumnforest had shared her contact with me at Ghost Adventures. (I used to actually have a contact there, but I didn’t follow up with them and ended up losing him. It was actually serendipitous Autumnforest was as generous and selfless as she was to share her contact like she did, and I’ll be forever grateful to her for doing it.)

Anyway, the GA contact sends out advanced info for bloggers to blog about. Then, if you send him your link, he’ll Tweet it.

With something like 14,000 followers following GA on Twitter, that’s pretty decent exposure.

Autumn had suggested I make it something snappy. Something to make people want to click. Because when she does it, she sees a HUGE spike in her numbers.

Well, easy for her to say “clever.” She’s insanely clever. (She did a funny one about a song, “Sunglasses at Night” and how it should be Zak’s theme song. It was really good.)

So…I did the best I could and came up with a short quiz about what does Ghost Adventures and Princess Bride have in common to tout the extended version of the Poveglia Island episode that was on last night. Then I gave clues in the form of quotes and a picture.

Ghost Adventures did Tweet it, and my bit.ly stats for that link also set a not-likely-to-be-topped-anytime-soon record: 536! (I average about 6-10 clicks per bit.ly link. In the teens is good. Above 20 is great. Once I hit 50 something and that was the record holder.)

So that’s how I know it was the GA tweet that helped me so much. (That and a lot of my new followers have GA twibbons on their avatars.)

But it also didn’t hurt that A&E (as in A&E on cable TV) included me among those they gave #FF shout outs too also.

So Friday January 22, 2010 will go down in my record books as an absolutely marvelous and fun, not to mention record-setting, Follow Friday!

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Tags: #FF, Follow Friday, Haunt Jaunts