Everytime you open your Twitter account, it's always a bliss when someone else added you as a friend, or when people decides to follow your tweets. I don't know, but it has always been a trend that the more follower you have, the more popular you are, thus more chances of having your tweets be read by readers and eventually be re-tweeted by others.
However, not all the figures on you sidebar indicates the correct ones. For a long time Twitter has been battling with spam accounts and just recently they decided its about time they get rid of them. But because they are getting spam accounts out of their database, it also means you will significantly lose some of your 'spam followers' or even your followed pages.
Twitter has announced this change in their Twitter Status blog.
"For some time, the follower and following counts we display have been incorrect for some folks. We’re soon to push a change that will address this issue. This means that the count you see in your sidebar should match what you see on your follower and following pages.
However, a consequence of this change is that follower counts will drop for some people. In particular, those with large followings may see significant changes as we correct for spam accounts and data inconsistencies. No legitimate followings should be affected—we’re just cleaning up artifacts in the system."
As mentioned, those with larger following will most likely suffer from big losses on their followers. Celebrities and companies are of course the first one to experience this. But for ordinary users with limited network, this change will hardly be noticed.
