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Twitter Begins Testing Polls Within a Tweet

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twitter polls tweetsIf you have ever wanted to do a quick poll of your followers, you would either need to watch all your @replies or use a third party off-site polling tool in order to calculate results.  But it appears that Twitter is testing a poll that you can embed directly within a tweet.

Ryan Hoover posted the following tweet yesterday:

twitter poll 1After you vote, you can see the totals of voting as well:

twitter poll 2It isn’t clear what is currently powering these polling tweets, so it is likely in-house as opposed to a third party solution teaming up with Twitter to display their polls in tweets.

There are some great opportunities to use this for decision making on the fly.  For example, the Oakland Raiders used it yesterday to let the fans decide which player should be featured behind the scenes for that day’s practice.

twitter poll 3

Not all users currently have access to polls, but it isn’t restricted to just verified users, as non-verified users are also using them.  If you have the option to add a poll, there will be a new “Poll” box that sites between the location and the character count on the Twitter web client when you go to compose a tweet.  The create poll option is not available in Tweetdeck.

It also displays quite differently to mobile users when viewing a poll:

twitter poll 4The one major downside is that you cannot embed a tweet with the poll included and some Twitter clients are not yet showing the poll unit within the tweet.  Here it is embedded, and it looks similar when a Twitter client cannot display it – simply the question without the poll underneath:

A nice addition but I suspect it will get old very quickly if everyone begins making endless polls and the Twitter feed becomes cluttered with them.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post
Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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