Thanks to intrepid research reported by the Harvard Business Review, we can now point to something that supports common sense:

the number of followers of a Tweeter is largely meaningless

It also alerts us to the (some would say) cynical ‘sell pans to the gold miners’ approach some ‘operators’ use to make money by promising riches…

there are advertising companies that offer users tips on how to increase their follower count and they pay popular users with a lot of followers to insert ads in their tweets. We sought to investigate this hype in a more rigorous way …

Worth reading if you’re interested.