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:

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.

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