Seems to me that at some point in nearly every company's timelines, the customer relationship inverts and the company stops seeing their role being to service the customer and rather the customer's role being to service the company. It's a nearly inevitable aspect of success that customers come to depend on a company's product or service and at that point the power relationship inverts. If a company is any good, it achieves this, and if it's not, it probably gets replaced by a competitor who is better at it.

So in the end, you have things like this where eventually "following" is not there to help you it's there to help the social media company data mine you for signals. The contract is that you then can get indirect secondary benefit, hopefully you have a better chance of then getting the messages people are trying to send you. But the power relationship is very clear; their needs are first and yours are second.