With all the talk about using questionnaires and quizzes as forms of content to engage customers and get to know more about them, social media platforms are making it easier and easier for eCommerce marketers to set these up.
Very recently Twitter enabled a polling feature to its tweets. Earlier this option was available only to advertisers who use Twitter for business, now short twitter surveys have become accessible to all Twitter users.
How to create Twitter polls?
Now, even brands that don’t spend on Twitter advertising can create a Twitter poll by just hitting the “pie chart” poll icon to the left of the “Tweet” button.
Clicking on the button gives you two additional input fields where you can put in words or phrases, up to 20 characters each. If you want you can add a third and fourth option too, again each one with a 20 character upper limit.
You can introduce/describe the poll with a regular tweet, except that it is 24 characters short. A poll tweet can be only 116 characters long.
Once you have composed the tweet, hit the tweet button and you are ready to roll, err..poll.
Some pretty neat features of Twitter polls are:
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Limited period: The poll expires in 24 hours. So, this is the best way to get quick opinions.
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Real-time results: As soon as a user takes the poll, the results so far are made available to them.
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Anonymous polling: There is more hope for engagement because the user’s followers don’t know that they took the poll. People are more likely to express their honest opinions. This improves both quality and quantity or responses.
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Poll-end push notification: In addition, once the poll expires, Twitter pushes a notification to all the users who took the poll. This throws your brand/tweet once more in the users’ timelines bringing in that much more visibility.
All these features along with the simplicity with which you can create an online poll contribute to help you reach out to your users/followers. Here’s how you can use twitter for business.
How to use twitter for eCommerce business
Evaluate past: You want to check how a product you introduced, a concept you experimented with, a change you made worked out? Use Twitter polls to figure it out.
Tweak present: Even an ongoing offer, the scheme can be evaluated on a Twitter poll. The same can be adjusted to incorporate the feedback you receive from the poll.
Get a hang on future: If there is a new idea your creative team is toying with but are unsure of the investment. Here’s your chance to get an opinion for free!
Topical engagement: Sometimes, you just want to be visible. You want to do your bit so that you show up in your users’ timelines. You could ask a fun topical question about politics, sports, entertainment to do so. Of course, you have to make it relevant to your product, but that is a given.
Decision making: While Twitter won’t make the decision for you, it is a sure way to guide you when you are confused or are in a genuine dilemma.
This is a really empowering tool at your fingertips and promises to become only stronger. When Twitter opened up polls for all its users, they were allowed only two options, it has now increased to four. This is only a sign of more features to come like say more options, choice of an expiry date, presentation options and so on.
