My thought was that if you are following 100x more people than the number of followers you have that Google might look at that as a less valuable Twitter member.
Say I've got 400 followers, not bad. But I'm following 8,000 people. Will that effect the potency of my re-tweets in Google's eyes vs if I had 400 followers and was following only 50 people?
That's part of my question.
The second part is what non-bot organic way is the quickest and best way to gain followers? Does it attact more people to tweet 50 times a day until random people see your tweets and follow you, or is it better to only tweet a little but follow a TON of people so that you gain a lot of follows from nice people who follow everybody that follows them?
That's the summary.
In my opinion, the point of "white hat" twitter is to drive traffic, not to enhance SEO. here is my reasoning:
If you are trying to create social signals for Google to recognize, you will need to get thousands of retweets and people tweeting your link, and, unfortunately, that is very hard to do in a short period of time. It is like building a company with enough hype around it to get thousands of people talking about it in their tweets. And, if you can do that, then you already have a good following, and you won't even neeed SEO to make money for that site.
I think the core of any Twitter marketing method is going to be implementing the follow/unfollow method. It is the best way to get noticed on a consistent basis with very little work. Scrape a ton of followers who you think would be interested in your product/service/site/ Follow them at a pace you are comfortable with, and unfollow the nonreciprocals after 2 days. I would use a bot for this, as there is no reason not to. If you pace out the time between follows enough you can do a couple hundred a day, but start smaller, and do more after a few days. Once the accounts age a bit, I do 1000 follows a day. After you have followers, you can start tweeting your links as well as some link-free,user-engaging tweets.
I wouldnt even consider this black hat because I see big companies do it all the time, and even celebrities. People on Twitter are used to seeing people following thousands of people, and I don't think google even cares.