Not necessarily. If you're being followed by 7,000 "people" who really turn out to be just Twitterfeed dumps and folks trying to sell you something, that's a useless set of followers. If you have 1,000 followers where a good portion of them actually interact on Twitter (and with you), I think that's more helpful. I know people with tens of thousands of followers who can't seem to get more than 10 people to retweet any blog post they write, but others with less who seem more influential.