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I'm pretty sure you have noticed that the "top dogs" are desperately into gaining all the Twitter followers they can possibly get. For example there was recently an offer by Jason Calacanis from Mahalo for $120,000 to Twitter, Inc. to get on the top 20 recommended follow list which shows up to new users after the sign up for the Twitter service, for a term of one year and he was willing to pay $250,000 for two years AND he is also willing to pay it up in ADVANCE.
Michael Arrington wrote a post on TechCrunch about how he views the "value" of Twitter traffic. He does go into detail of how many page views TechCrunch is getting from these followers and they are pretty interesting numbers to ponder upon. In the post, Michael states that Jason said he believes that acquiring all those followers, he could pull in $1 million more in revenue for his company. Now let me just say this- $1 million from Twitter traffic would require A LOT of spamming AND retweets. These are just speculative numbers, but I think that a lot of people seem to be turning Twitter into some business resource or a "game" of who can get the most followers and publicity.
As many of you probably know, Guy Kawasaki has a new start-up under his belt- Alltop. If you go check out his Twitter timeline, there is a lot of Alltop promotion throughout the day- each and every day. According to this Alexa the current rank for the site is at about 61,000. Keep in mind that there is A LOT of Alltop promotion going on all day and with Guy's 83,000 or so followers and all that promotion, I would expect the site to be gaining more traction. I personally think Alltop is a great start-up and like the service a lot, but I'm just stating some thoughts here. I also think everyone can learn a lot from Guy Kawasaki.
You have probably seen a lot of contests on Twitter as well. Starting from people giving away Flips to other gadgets, in an attempt to gain more followers. The reality of the situation is- most people are probably just following for the prize and then unfollowing once they win- or lose.
But here is the even more interesting thing to think about. It doesn't really matter if you have 1, 100, or 1 billion followers on Twitter because after a certain point it is all about what you have to offer. Sooner or later people are going to figure you out- well those of which are actual followers and not bots. If they like what you have to say, they will keep up with what you are saying, but if you keep promoting to them all day, every day, and it is mediocre information, followers aren't going to click your links.
I guess it all comes down to the risk factor. If you are willing to take the risk to build up your follower count to whatever number actively, you better be prepared to DELIVER to people and not just market some 1/2 baked service. Eventually the true useful products and services always win, with or without Twitter.
