With Twitter recently launching a new polling feature, it is likely you will have already considered what this could mean for your brand’s marketing efforts. To help shed some light on the potential of this new feature, we’ve decided to create this blog as a brief overview.
How Do Twitter Polls Work?
Todd Sherman, Twitter’s Product Manager, summarised the polls as “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.”
Though Twitter users have long been conducting their own polls of sorts by, for instance, asking for a ‘Retweet’ for A, and a ‘Favourite’ for B, Twitter have taken it upon themselves to provide users with the means to create two-button polls within the compose box. Open to anonymous voting, these polls will remain live for 24 hours and post no restriction on the number of polls users can participate in.
Straight from the horse’s mouth, below is a video explaining the functionality of the new feature:
Coming soon! We’re rolling out the ability for everyone to create polls on Twitter: https://t.co/pH5a8q9Ujz pic.twitter.com/ijAKEMUdf1
— Twitter (@twitter) October 21, 2015
Twitter Poll Overview:
• Polls are only active for 24 hours
• Options are limited to two answers
• Voting is anonymous
• Submitting a vote means users can view the results
• Users can view the number of votes and the remaining time
Given the functionality of these polls, it is important we consider their application in the context of marketing.
Market Research For New Products and Services
During the development of new services or products, feedback from the target market is absolutely critical, and what better way to gauge interest and reception to ideas than through simple, two-answer polls. For instance, consider questions such as “would you be interested in ABC” or “would XYZ be useful for your business?”.
Whilst the polarising “yes or no” nature of the polls might not offer businesses the most insightful feedback, these polls are undoubtedly useful in gauging early critical reception to product and service ideas in their infancy – you can then use these responses as the basis for additional polls consisting of more detailed questions.
Increasing Engagement
Like many other aspects of marketing, effective social media marketing is also subject to the ‘quality over quantity’ rule – it is more important to focus on meaningful engagement with your brand than a barrage of meaningless interactions from followers that are not particularly interested in your brand.
Given asking questions incentivises Twitter engagement from followers, polls are a convenient way to increase the interactions you receive and, as previously covered, poll votes can help provide you with useful insight. What’s more, any interaction with polls is likely to be more indicative of the truth, due to the anonymity of the polls.
By offering anonymous voting functionality to a pool of followers that are interested in your brand, asking the right questions can yield useful results for your business moving forward. In particular, we suggest using the polls to gauge interest in specific topics. By auditioning content ideas, you can gain a deeper knowledge of what your target audience values in terms of content, adjusting your content strategy accordingly for better, more sustainable content marketing results.
At Catalyst, we too are excited about Twitter’s new poll function and what it means for not only us as an agency, but for our clients.