How Twitter Polls Affect Your Business?

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Kontributor:

Iftifani Sayyida Asausan

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Based on wikipedia.org, Twitter is an online news and social networking service whigh users post and interact with messages known as “tweets”. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and lauched in July of that year also. The service started to gain worldwide popularity in 2012, more than 100 million user “tweets” in a day, also twitter service handled like 1.6 billion search queries in a day. 2013 was the best year of Twitter because it was in the top ten most visited websites and described as “SMS of the internet”.

As of the first quarter of 2018, Twitter averaged at 336 million monthly active user around the world. Twitter users come from various backgrounds, they can be a student, worker even the president. The users can say everything, everything they want like what they eat for lunch, what will they buy, or where will they go. Twitter is like a modern diary, kind of blog but we can communicate with people with the “mention” feature. The user that is registered can communicate and replying to each other tweets, non registered user can only read the tweets from the web browser.

New Twitter feature that can improve your business

 

In 2015, Twitter launch the ability to attach poll questions to tweets. Polls are open for up to 7 days, and voters are not personally identified so it’s anonymous. Based on dictionary.com, polling are a sampling or collection of opinions on a subject, taken from either a selected or a random group of persons, as for the purpose of analysis. Usually polls. the place where votes are taken.

Since Twitter is used by the company too, Twitter made this move. Twitter Polls was made to make the new experience of the company to do a quick research based on their follower. Their follower following the company’s account automatically the want to know the up to date product launched by the company or even complaining to them by Twitter. Right now there are lot of company using this platform not only to promote their product but literally communicate with the customer aroung the world.

The respon to the new feature is really good even in 2015 only verified accounts can use this feature. The polls run for 24 hours and provide two option. But now in 2018 the polls run for 7 days and provide 4 various option.

This is how Twitter Polls result look like:

How Twitter Polls Work?
There are a few key components of Twitter Polls: The 4 options, number of votes counted and time left before the poll closes and displayed final results.
Make a polls tweet is very easy! Just do like you want to tweets something in your Home or click the Tweet button in the top navigation bar and there will be an icon like this

Just click right there! You will find this

You can add 4 choices, also decide how long the poll length with the maximum 7 days. This is the example of Twitter Polls

When you find a poll in a Tweet, you can tap your option. The results displayed right after you vote, it also displayed the total amount of the voters and how much option are voted under the poll choices. To vote in Twitter Polls, you should be registered and you can vote in a poll one time. Even the voters are anonymous, you still need to be registered first.

Benefits of Twitter Polls Related to Business

1. Promote your product or services
   Promote your product on Twitter does not mean that you formally tweet saying that your customer need to buy xxx product. But you can make them choose how they would use between 2 of your product. Making a clever poll about your product will make your product known.
   
   



2. Asking for Prediction
   Mostly Twitter Polls are use to promote the company or the product with a good marketing strategy. Like your company want to lauch new product on Friday, you can tease your followers by making a polls about how the product look like, or what price, or anything related your new product.

You can even use hastags to make your product into the Trending Topic so people will be aware of your new product, usually people like to check the Trends section and if there are something interesting the user will automatically looking for it so it can be the benefits for your company too.





3. Get feedback from your followers

If you asking for prediction before the launch of your product, you can make poll again to know what the followers thinking after the launch of your product. Ask for feedback can help your business, if they not satisfied you will find another strategy and make innovation to produce new things.

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. For example, if you know Taco Bell, they already familiar with Twitter marketing. They even make a Twitter Poll to know which favourite Doritos that their customer choose.



4. Asking for opinion
   This can be your choice if you have a small company and you started to builds brand royalty by including their opinion to make a new product. You can ask your followers to vote on some aspects like: your new logo, your new product, the design of your new store or website, and your content ideas.

You can use the results of this Twitter Polls as your reference, it can help your research team to know what your customer want. Specially if the customers feel invested, it can also build customer’s loyalty.





5. Get to know your audience

Knowing your audience well can help you making a good product. Maybe Twitter Polls can be your option to do online survey, because if you do an usual survey it will take more of time and money. What if it’s not that worth? Twitter Polls are the simple way to do online survey with less time and money. There are also some website that will help you see Twitter Analytics to know about the demography of your followers to know what market exactly you are.

But… can I use Twitter Polls as my main source to delevelop my business?

Maybe that’s a no because there are still some issue about the user of twitter. You can use Twitter Polls as a quick survey but not the whole survey, you still need to understand and do some more research to know what exactly you looking for.

This is why Twitter Polls is not 100% relevant:

1. Your followers might not live in the same country as your company
   Just take an example, your company operate di Indonesia. There are always possibilities that you also have followers from different country and your company don’t have any store there. They join your Twitter Polls, but if you make their answer as your idea, they can enjoy and use your product too. Kind of useless and not relevant.
   
   
2. Your followers are not sure what you were talking about
   Your followers might be have different perspective, and they are not sure what are you talking about. As we know that people might follow lot of accounts on Twitter and it can be any possibilities that they not recognize and analyse that what kind of business you are. So they will click a random or anything that they think first after see your Twitter Polls. The results of Twitter Polls can be relevant if the user read and understand what the tweet about.
   
   
3. Your followers just clicked the first answer
   Your followers might be don’t care about your polls so they just click the first answer, it can be not their real answer. Or they don’t have enough time and don’t feel like reading all the option in the poll, there are high possibilities to select the first answer provided.
   it can be minimized if they are only two options in the polls, but if the polls have for options we can not guarantee that they will read it all.
   
   
4. Your followers did not feel like they find out the real answer
   There are any possibilities that they can’t find out what they want in your Twitter Polls, so they will leave it without choose of even choose the random option. Mostly they will choose random option just because they are curious about the final results. How much people choose option A, how much people choose option B.
   
   
5. Your followers choose the answer that they think the most people would choose
   Again, if your followers not sure about the option in the poll they will choose the answer that they think the most people would choose. Like people will love chocolate ice cream than blueberry ice cream because chocolate ice cream is very common and maybe almost all of us know how chocolate ice cream tasted like.
   
   
6. Your followers have multiple accounts and vote multiple times to change the final result of your Twitter Polls
   Nowadays people is like having multiple accounts. Like what I see that Indonesian Twitter user tend to have at least 2 accounts, one for professional account, one for random account. They also can use their 2 accounts to vote on different choice in one Twitter Polls, the result might be same between option A and option B.

Don’t worry!

Twitter also take an action for one of the issue, the upgraded Twitter rules is more strict since you need to add your real birthday and verify your account with e-mail of phone number.

Once you violate the rules of how using Twitter, your account can be suspended and blocked from the service. The worst thing is you can not make new account again.

I do agree that Twitter upgraded rules will make the user save and all the business owner can use Twitter maximally to develop their business by asking for opinion to their customer and understand them well.