Confirmed!
I agree it was a long comment :), but you share something amazing with us. If you haven't already, you should consider putting this together in a post. Lots of good material.

It is important to get a following, but sadly enough, nowadays you can't really measure the following based on your followers. An example of that is accounts that follow 60K accounts and in return, they get 20K followers. :) True followers are those that always show up on your blog to make valuable comments. Those kinds of followers we gain by making quality comments, and we keep them as followers by maintaining a genuine conversation whenever they post something.