Twitter is experimenting with polls that appear natively in desktop and mobile timelines, and sports brands quickly jumped on the bandwagon.
The feature, which started appearing last week, offers the ability to create basic polls with two answers. Currently, only select accounts have the ability to create them. But Twitter, which confirmed that it’s testing the new feature, clearly gave the keys to many sports-related brands, as well as some media organizations, journalists and Twitter employees.
The polls, embedded within the tweet, are visible on the desktop and mobile apps for 24 hours, with the time remaining to vote displayed.
After the poll expires, the results — how many people voted and the percentage for each choice — are shown.
It’s a slick-looking, low-barrier-to-engagement feature that should be popular with brands if it’s rolled out more broadly. Many sports and a few entertainment brands took advantage of their early access, tweeting polls that have generated strong engagement:
This isn’t the first time Twitter has experimented with native polling, but previous efforts have involved custom Twitter cards created for advertisers. Such polls aren’t among the standard card features in the self-service advertising platform, they apparently are available for the buying because there’s at least one current campaign using Twitter Card polling. Friday, UK grocery retailer Tesco ran a pick-your-favorite-cookie poll:
That poll is different from the experiment that emerged on Thursday, which seems likely to eventually be consumer-facing. That means brands and business who want an easy way to create a polling experience will be able to do that quickly.
That ability has been popular in the past on Facebook, but the social network eliminated the polling feature for Pages in 2013, much to the dismay of many small businesses. Google+ introduced native polling in October of 2014..
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