There’s still much debate about whether follower growth is a worthwhile pursuit on twitter. Many argue that twitter is a tool for communicating with friends. Others argue that it has worthwhile business application.

I think the answer lies somewhere between the two. Below is a list of reasons why having a large following on twitter may be valuable. Hopefully this will give you something to think about. There are also valid reasons not to grow your following, but that’s for a later article.

1) Search Engine Rankings: Pagerank is the term most-often cited for influencing your position in Google search results. Google ranks sites using this, and it is heavily influenced by the number and quality of links to a site. A full discussion of this is beyond this article, but you can find many good descriptions of it on the web. Much discussion has taken place around whether tweeted links will affect your search results ranking. The straight-forward answer is no. The reason is that twitter uses “nofollow” attributes in their links. This tells Google not to use the links, and hence it does not count towards any ranking.

Tweets aren’t only presented on twitter. They also get pulled via the API into other pages. The API doesn’t insert nofollows, and some of these other sites present the links unmodified. There will therefore be some indirect influence on your rank via these other pages.

2) Social Proof: You are more likely to be listened to if you have a large following already. This is because people look to others for guidance all the time. This is largely a subconscious process, but we tend to feel more comfortable with a choice when we see other endorsing it.

3) Driving Traffic: When you tweet a link people will click on it. As your following grows, the click through rate will diminish usually, but it will still drive traffic. It’s possible to maintain adequate click through rates with a very large following. You can drive a few hundred people to a site within a few minutes. If you have a blog, then this can become a quick way to create page views for your content.

4) Viral Effect: As you grow your followers, so will the number of retweets you get. As the number of retweets grows, so do the clicks from those retweets. It’s the viral effect, and the greater your following the more you will experience it’s effects.

5) Branding: Spam your followers with low-quality updates and you’re likely to alienate them. Add value and you’re likely to get a lot of benefit from having your profile scrolling across their screen regularly.

6) Expert Power: If your game is to be the guru, then building a following on twitter is very relevant. Due to the broadcast nature of the system, when you help people out you create visibility for your expertise. You don’t even have to be very active to be effective here. Just by being mildly active in your area of expertise you’re likely to build relevance as an expert. You will get referrals too, and these referrals will also be seen by the followers of the people sending them. This all goes hand-in with social proof. Initially, an expert with a large following will be perceived as genuine. Of course, it’s your job to maintain that credibility thereafter. If you are a blogger, then you need to pay attention to this point.

7) Belief Consistency: following on from the previous point, people will also naturally attempt to make their beliefs and behaviours consistent with each other. Tell a child they are lazy, even if they are not, and you can be sure that they will become lazy in the future. What we believe, we tend to become, and vice versa. If someone follows you because you have thousands of followers already, they’re likely pay attention to what you’re saying (especially if you are not following them back). The reason for this is their need to make their beliefs consistent with their behaviour. Subconsciously they will feel that they must be following you for some valid reason, otherwise why would they be following you? Their belief system will need to change to include you as an interesting person. If they actually do read tweets, then they’re very likely to read yours due to this.

Some followers obviously do not read their tweets, and as such a lot of these arguments can lose ground in the face of this, but it’s hard to discount them under all circumstances…

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