Is "lots" of followers a good idea? Or is the idea to have valuable conversations?

Date: Wed Feb 05 2014 Twitter »»»» Social Media for Good
We’re looking to create social good via social media networking websites. There are plenty of competing ideas on the best way to operate a social media networking account to create the most impact.
I recently got a twitter follow request from someone who’s obviously following the “gain as many twitter followers as possible” strategy. I follow a different strategy (see: On pruning twitter followers and why it matters who follows you) and inspect @Yapparently as an example.

First - How the bleep do you get followed by 34,000+ other accounts while making only 64 tweets? Did they do something surreptitious? Having thousands of followers along with thousands of tweets is rather normal, because those followers probably find the tweets valuable. But with so few tweets, how could the followers have any sense of the person running that account?

The normal twitter follower strategy is to follow a bunch of people, because some of them will follow you in return. It’s most likely the owner of this account followed that strategy.

Second - the content on the account right now isn’t the typical spammer posting links to various products. It looks like someone with a slightly eclectic set of interests. The account might be controlled by a real person.

Third - The account they followed has a specific purpose, to discuss electric vehicles. The Yapparently account is not compatible with my account. Therefore I will not follow them, but the question remains whether to block that account. Obviously I’m concerned about whether they’re a spammer, and I tend to shun twitter spammers by blocking them whenever I find one.

The question is “what will that person do with all those followers”? As it stands they don’t look like a spammer. But having garnered that many followers, will they turn into a spammer to exploit that follower base? There’s no clarity with Yapparently, they don’t look like a spammer despite the unnaturally large number of following/followers. Hence I won’t be blocking them.