I don’t think this is such a good idea. What it leads to is artificial inflation of followers that disrupts algorithms for determining influence (yeah they are pretty weak right now but constantly improving). It also leads to the most popular profiles benefiting from the law of accelerating returns and that’s not the meritocracy that social networks are supposed to represent.
Last month Twitter quietly launched a new feature that generated a list of suggested users to follow. Most likely as a result of this list, the followers to many Twitter accounts increased exponential over the course of the last month. @LiveEarth, my employer’s twitter account (which is maintained primarily by me), saw a rise in followers from the mid 2,000s to over 90,000 between January 16 and February 22, when, suddenly, the meteoric rise in followers came to a screeching halt.
The same thing happened in RSS when “feed bundles” and default feeds in applications started distorting subscriber numbers, the result being that the number of subscribers reported for an RSS feed is pretty much a worthless number today.