Polling Twitter

 Welcome to Twitter Tuesday.
Every Tuesday we will post about Twitter. Stop by for advice and how to's for
marketing professionals. Every other week we will post our AppQuest Edition
featuring a review of Twitter applications. 

What’s the best way to get feedback from
Twitter?

If you’re using Twitter for your brand, at some
point you’re probably going to want to understand how your followers feel about
your brand, service or product. Polling is an excellent way to get a quick
understanding of how people feel. It’s also a great way to run a contest, get
demographic information on your followers, or get a rating on an idea. There
are several sites that do just this. Their features range from only one service
to a wide variety of services with a slight service fee.

I sat down with my co-workers and created a
wish-list of qualities that we as marketing people want in a Twitter polling
service. Of course, all the apps have to be free and require no downloadable
client. Beyond that, we wanted to be able to:

• have an easy-to-use interface
• get the hang of it quickly
• have a unique url
• use analytics
• use multiple types of polls
• insert images
• brand polls
• make them visually interesting
• tag keywords
• categorize topics
• leave a message
• embed on our site

The evaluation method was simple. I visited each
site and registered. After my profile loaded, I took a screenshot of the
interface and then spent about ten minutes looking around the site. A decent
site should be able to explain itself in that time. After using the application,
I rated each site against my wish list.

Polls.tw is one of the simpler
polling sites. You ask the question and then enter the multiple choice answers
below. Polls.tw will post a short URL to Twitter. You login to Twitter using
OAuth to track your results. It also allows you to leave a comment. That’s it.
It could have been so much more with a bit of work.

PROS: Easy to use and creates a poll that can be
easily used by others. 

CONS: It only creates one type of poll: multiple
choice. All the other sites do the same thing but offer a lot more features.

RATING:

 

Poll Your Followers is another extremely
simple to use site to create surveys/polls on Twitter. You can create either
yes/no questions or multiple choice. Poll Your Followers pops up when you first
view a Twitter profile. This is great if you ever go to that person’s profile,
but if you use a third party site to access Twitter, you’ll never see the poll.
You also get a short URL to the poll for retweeting and sharing with others.

PROS: Easy to use for short multiple choice polls.

CONS: Outside of posting a poll, it has no other
functions. You can’t leave any feedback or find out who voted in your poll.
This is another site that needs a few more features to make it worth your while.

RATING:

 

Twttrstrm is a free tool from Squidoo. It’s one of the more interesting
Twitter polling tools. You can ask any kind of question, create keywords to
track, pick a category and add tags to make the poll searchable. Once you
submit your question, it creates a Squidoo like lense or page that has a wide variety of functions. The
new page is a standalone site that allows any Twitter user to start a
discussion, ask for advice, add YouTube videos and basically create a resource
for others surrounding your Twitter question. 

From their website:

Here’s the
magic part: as your followers click through and respond, the storm spreads to
their followers. So, in short, it’s a threaded, viral, structured conversation
in the middle of the Twitter melee.

There is an abundance of information that could be
added to your Twitter poll, to the point where it can be overwhelming.

 

PROS: Twttrstrm is easy to set up. The lense aspect
is unique to Squidoo and creates an incredible resource around your questions.

CONS: It’s a mess. Looking at examples from other
more established polls, it’s a hodgepodge of information that can be very
difficult to sort through.

RATING:

StrawPoll is the most visually interesting of the polling
sites. You can ask any question as long as it only has two possible answers. It
sounds very limited, but where they succeed is in listing the answers for each
side of the question which helps provide some extra insight into the answer. You
get your own url that uses the background of your Twitter profile.

 

PRO: Of the single feature sites, I like this one
the best. It’s simple to use, visually appealing and allows you to see the
tweets surrounding your poll.

CONS: It’s usefulness is limited to just the one
type of question. The site feels like more of a gimmick than something that a
business would seriously use.

RATING:

 

 

SocialToo lets you ask multiple choice or yes/no questions and gives you a
bunch of useful tools for Twitter, identi.ca, and Facebook. On Twitter you can:

• Create surveys
• Auto-follow
• Auto-unfollow
• Blacklist
• Direct Message new followers
• Receive a daily stats email

There are a lot of useful little things you can do, but beyond the basic poll
creation and stat tracking you have to pay for each add on. Also, it’s pretty
ugly.

PROS: Simple interface and lots of nice add-on
features.

CONS: You have to pay for the add-ons and it’s not
the most attractive layout.

RATING:

 

 

With 17 different question templates including
multiple choice, rankings and matrices, Twtpoll gives you all the options
you’ll need to gauge public opinion. It gives you a custom url and your Twitter
icon appears with the poll. You can also brand your poll, but this requires a
nominal fee that you choose yourself. You can also add pictures to go along
with each answer option, making the poll more visually lively. Once you start
getting results, you can view them in pie charts, bar charts and tables. The
only downside is that there’s no option to ad keywords.

PROS: Lots of question types, has a clean and
simple look and it’s easy to spread your poll around.

CONS: Branding must be paid for and it lacks
keyword tags.

RATING: 

Poll Everywhere has the most polished offer of all the
sites. But there’s a big catch: if you plan on getting more than 30 responses
to your question, you have to pay them. The coolest thing about Poll Everywhere
is that it’s mobile – respondents can send in answers via text message and the
results update in real time in your browser or in a PowerPoint presentation. So
this is a great tool if you want to give a presentation where the audience can
text in responses to your poll and have the results displayed without missing a
beat. The reports it generates are also more advanced than the other sites.

It’s not a bad deal if you need software to interact with an
audience. Otherwise, you can get the functionality you need for free elsewhere.

PROS: Instant stats gathered from phones make it an ideal
audience polling tool.  It also
generates professional reports.

CONS: Price tag not worth paying if you just want to send
your poll out through Twitter or other social media channels.

RATING:

 

CONCLUSION: While there are some sites that are easy to use,
one trick ponies, it’s worth putting a little extra effort into your polls with
the sites that offer more functionality. Twtpoll edges out Twttrstrm as it
provides nearly all the features we wanted while still being simple to use and
visually appealing.

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media and won't shut up about Twitter.

Download the Slideshare version of this blog post.