You are at a decent restaurant in town and you cannot decide whether to get the steak or the schnitzel. That’s okay, just give your Twitter followers the vote. The social networking site is rolling out a new feature that will allow users to set up two-choice polls on Android and other devices.
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
While using Twitter for voting and polling is not new, the Polls ability will become the easiest way of gauging public opinion. The feature is accessible from the tweet compose box, where the tweeter can ask anything then give two different options underneath the tweet. The poll is then active for 24 hours, where anyone can vote on any poll however whatever you choose will not be shared publicly.
Twitter has started rolling out the Polls feature on Android, iOS and the desktop, which should be available for everyone over the coming days.
Now if you excuse me, I am just about to order some steak, the runaway winner of my little poll.
Source: Twitter Blogs
They’ve done it. Twitter has cracked the code. No, it’s not a new CEO. Nope, it’s not a new way to deliver content with context that you might be interested in.
It’s polls.
The unfinished feature has hit the streams of many Twitter employees and early adopters. I’d embed one, but yeah, I can’t.
The great thing about Twitter, and something Jack Dorsey and the founding team likes to reiterate, is that the platform is a place where people can share their thoughts, speak their minds and do it all in real-time. Nothing says the exact opposite of that than polls. The truth is that Twitter needs structured data to make money. Lots of structured data. Something Facebook figured out a long long time ago. Rather than scanning all of the 140-character musings of its 300 million users for sentiment and other signals, we get polls.
Do you like me? Y/N
I’ve certainly used Twitter to ask questions of people who are nice enough to follow me (I’m very sorry for those who do). I’ve gotten some great answers. But the only reason why I’ve gotten great answers is because I didn’t limit people to two, three, four or whatever answers. They had 140 characters minus my username to respond. And it’s magic.