The “Suggested Users” feature of Twitter has left many souls unhappy and rightly so because the moment your Twitter profile shows up on the suggested list, your follower count can grow almost exponentially thus making you look all the more “influential”.

A high follower count on Twitter can certainly give an ego boost but will your servers crash if a popular Twitter user with half a million followers tweets about your web site?

I did a quick and very unscientific study to determine the relation (if any) between “Twitter follower count” and “web traffic” using random tweets of popular technology bloggers and here’s what I found:

If Mashable or TechCrunch (each having >300k followers) share a link on Twitter, the target website can expect anywhere between 3.5k to 6k visitors. On the other hand, someone like Steve Rubel (with ~20k followers) can alone send 1.1k to 2.2k new visitors from a single tweet though he’s just 5% the size of Mashable in terms of Twitter follower count.

And here’s some more data to suggest that 10x more Twitter followers don’t necessarily mean that links mentioned in their tweets would get 10x more clicks.

Mashable (Pete Cashmore) - 345,606 Followers

• Why Brands Love Mommy Bloggers - 3,729 clicks

• Picli, a Hybrid of Digg and Flickr - 3,146 clicks

• Fring Launches a Better Twitter Mobile Experience - 4,899 clicks

• MySpace and Microsoft Team Up - 6,149 clicks

• Microsoft Encarta Succumbs to Wikipedia - 5,329 clicks

  TechCrunch (Michael Arrington) - 314,985 Followers

• Dell 24-inch monitor for \$209 - 4,484 clicks

• Habbo Pulled In \$74 Million - 3,211 clicks

• TinyURL Is Worth At Least \$46m - 3,844 clicks

• JK Rowling Attacks Scribd - 3,693 clicks

• Is Facebook Lowballing Numbers - 3,178 clicks

  Om Malik - 28,341 Followers

• Google’s Market Cap Bigger Than GE - 1,278  clicks

• bit.ly raises around \$2 million - 1,344 clicks

• BlackBerry to Launch TV Episodes - 620 clicks

• MacBook and 460 kgs of CO2 - 720 clicks

  Robert Scoble - 77,152 Followers

• Help @loic and @furrier find hosting - 1,859 clicks

Dave Winer - 20,773 Followers

• If I deleted my Twitter account - 894 clicks

• Encarta, then and now - 653 clicks

• Digg for Ads - 525 clicks

• Is Firefox slower than other browsers - 783 clicks

  Steve Rubel - 20,745 Followers

• Twitter could own your Google footprint - 2,203 clicks

• Twitter Tweaks Its Title Tags - 1,121 clicks

• Twitter Gadget features - 1,196

  Fred Wilson - 17,240 Followers

• Blogger Jessica Wilson - 869 clicks

• Plan to save local newspapers - 705 clicks

• Thoughts on Bit.ly funding - 2,842 clicks