How Twitter Followings Illustrate Link Popularity on Google

I've been setting up some new Twitter accounts for clients like Premium Sofas and Zen Cart Web Design, and working to get them more followers. In the process it occurred to me that the relative value of different Twitter accounts based on the Followers/Following quite resembles the theory of link popularity which Google uses to assess popularity of a website.

For example on Twitter, a lot of Followers make a user look good, just like a lot of backlinks to a site look good. But look deeper and if you have more Followers than people you follow, you look even better. More sites linking to your website than you link to, also looks good (which is one of the reasons I don't tend to focus huge amounts of effort on self cancelling reciprocal links).

But then I thought about how your new Twitter account can gain kudos just by having a very popular Twitter user follow you. I mean, imagine the impact of say Stephen Fry following you, based just on the number of people who follow him (nearly 1.5 million followers at time of writing). This immediate surge in publicity is kind of like the extra brownie points Google gives your site when you get a link from a really credible and authorative website, that in turn has a lot of links which point to it.

This is why whenever clients send me a cold link request they've received and ask what I think, I always check the Page Rank of the site offering to trade links first. If it's not popular, there's little point.

In the future I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter replicates some kind of version of Page Rank (if they don't already) based on the difference between your Followers/Following, and the number of Followers your Followers have got.