Is Twitter useless for building followers?

Over on the In Over Your Head blog, they’re asking, “is Twitter useless for building followers?” The core of the “yes” argument seems to be:

For me, the most effective way to get followed on Twitter is actually not to be on Twitter at all, but instead to be somewhere in person (conference etc.) and show your Twitter handle onscreen. But the point is that if you point your audience from Twitter to a blog, they might subscribe, and from a blog, they might follow you on Twitter. But getting RT’ed is doesn’t build audience if it doesn’t go to your content.

I have 2 responses to this:

1) it only partly reflects our experience here at Fruition. We find the surest way to build followers AND get retweets is to tweet a lot. On days when we tweet 3 or more times a day, we get way more Twitter love all around. It makes sense - say relevant things often enough and people will pay attention and start repeating what you say.

2) Who gives a crap? If presenting at conferences or linking to your own blog content from your tweets builds a bigger following for you faster (and building a bigger following is important to you) do THOSE things. Focus on the things that get results and don’t put energy into things that don’t.

Implicit in the argument is that having more Twitter followers has value. I agree. And if you need to tweak your tactics to get those followers, why not do that?