There are many high profile Twitter accounts with in excess of 100,000 followers, including Shaq’s profile (304,000 followers), Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch profile (225,000 followers), and iJustine’s profile (226,000 followers).

The question now is, what is the value of having all of these followers? Arrington has opened up about his own profile and how many page views he has gotten from direct Twitter traffic.

Now, TechCrunch is a great blog and has worked hard at getting most of those followers, but more recently, it was able to quadruple its followers after Twitter added TC to the suggested list accounts. Now, another thing I’ve noticed, many accounts do not have an avatar, but more interestingly, they all have 20 followers, which begs the question: are these accounts fake? Twitter maintains they are not, but it does raise suspicion. TechCrunch says:

65,573 hard core users brought us 130,000 January page views [before being put on the suggested list]. Nearly quadrupling that number of followers will only bring in an extra 20,000 page views in March.

Reports also indicate that during last Christmas, Dell was able to generate $1 million in sales from Twittering promotions.

There are also indications that Twitter will start charging companies a fee who use the service to promote their offerings. Via