Twitter has long been the place to turn for opinions on everything from who will win tonight’s game to ideas for your next blog post.
And now it’s just become even easier to gather opinions from your audience on Twitter. With the release of its new Polls feature (available to all Twitter accounts in the coming days), you can now create super-simple polls directly on Twitter with just the click of a button or a tap on your phone. As with many new features, people are eager to learn:
- How can you get started with Twitter polls?
- How do they work?
- How can you use them to boost your marketing and your business?
Polls on Twitter aren’t a totally new concept. In fact people have been running polls on Twitter for a long time through either a “retweet/favorite to vote” mechanism or by using hashtags to count votes. Twitter polls appear to be a much more effective way to run polls and opens up polls to everyone, natively.
Twitter users can now create their own two-option polls and gather votes from their audience. Polls are a native feature?—?meaning the polls are embedded directly into the tweets, rather than having to use Twitter Cards.
If you want the public’s opinion on anything?—?what to name your dog, who will win tonight’s game, which election issue people care most about?—?there’s no better place to get answers than on Twitter. For poll creators, it’s a new way to engage with Twitter’s massive audience and understand exactly what people think. For those participating, it’s a very easy way to make your voice heard.
Polls are extremely new and there’s not yet any public data on how polls boost engagement or the rate at which followers engage with this feature. Some early polls have been very popular though with many people participating and a high level of retweets. Twitter’s Todd Sherman explains more over at Product Hunt:
Engagement is quite high. Novelty is undoubtedly part of it, but I expect it to be a small part. When you look at some of the polls that have gone big, they tend to be ask questions where people have real opinions, or they are jokes.
Polls spur more conversations around the topic than asking the same question without a poll because people reflect on what others think. It’s going to be fascinating to see how people adapt to this new feature.
To help you get a head start, here are nine ways you can utilise Twitter poll:
1. Letting followers vote on content
Polls can be a great way to not only create engaging content for your followers but to also involve your followers in the content creation process and allow them to play a part in deciding what content you publish.
2. Asking for Predictions
Whether it’s who will win the NFL game or who will come out on top in the latest TV talent show, predictions have been a huge part of Twitter conversations for many years. Polls provide a new, fun, and engaging way to ask for predictions from your audience and a platform from which to build conversation.
3. Having fun
Polls don’t always have to be serious and using Twitter’s new feature as a way to have some fun with your followers could be a great way to boost engagement.
4. Requesting product feedback
Requesting feedback from customers can sometimes feel like a big ask. Polls could be a great way to get bitesize pieces of product feedback in a more fun, snackable way. Try to think about scenarios within your product, learnings you’re after or hypotheses you’re looking to validate that can be broken down into simple two-answer questions and put them out there as polls. Polls won’t give you all the data you need to move ahead with big decisions, but they could help you to get the ball rolling.
5. Reacting to real-time events
Twitter is amazing for real time coverage and reaction to events, and polls add another layer to this real-time engagement. Instead of tweeting a question to your followers and trawling through hundreds of replies to gauge reaction, you can use a poll to check what your audience things.
6. Gathering opinions for news stories
For years, news companies have polled opinions to sit alongside and support their stories. Twitter polls are a fantastic way to quickly see a snapshot, public opinion on a topic. If you’re writing a news piece or even something for your blog, you could create a Twitter poll to include within your piece.
7. Lean market research
Polls provide an awesome way to grab opinions from a snapshot of your audience. If you have a hypothesis floating around about your market, you could create a simple poll as a first step to validating your thoughts. This quick, lean approach will take minimal time and give you results in 24 hours or less. From your results you can then look at whether or not you’d like to further explore your original hypothesis.
8. Feedback on what you post
Fans and followers love to feel connected to their favorite brands and individuals. Polls open up the opportunity to build even stronger connections. You could use polls to give your followers the opportunity to help shape your content strategy and provide feedback on what they’d like to see more (or less) of in one simple click.
9. Embed polls in a blog post
Embedding your tweets is a great way to increase reach and drive more attention to your profile. Embedding tweets containing polls into your blog can add an interactive element too. This could be a great way to engage your readers and get them re-engaging with your content or Twitter account to discover the results. Once a poll within your embedded tweet is over, the tweet will show the results and still provide added value to your overall blog post.