Twitter tests out polls inside your tweets

By David Nield Published September 27, 2015

turkish journalist jailed over tweets twitter pad — rvlsoft/Shutterstock.com

Trying to stay relevant in the social networking market isn’t easy, which is why you find the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest constantly rolling out new features to try and keep as many eyeballs as possible inside their apps. Twitter’s latest play? Polls.

siegler tweet — Image used with permission by copyright holder

There’s been no official word from Twitter but users have been reporting the new feature and The Guardian has written up some of the responses. If you want to see a Twitter poll up and running, try this one from MG Siegler of Google Ventures. For the time being at least you can only set two choices in a poll and the feature doesn’t yet work in clients such as TweetDeck.

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It does, however, seem to work on both the desktop website and the mobile apps released by Twitter itself. It looks like a lot of Twitter staff have the feature, and a few users with verified accounts, but it’s definitely not available to everyone right now. As with any feature undergoing testing, it may never properly launch, or it might change significantly before it does.

Twitter is still searching for a CEO as it looks to make up ground on Facebook and Instagram (which recently announced 400 million users — Twitter is nearer 300 million). The social network has been adding several new features, such as Buy buttons and longer Direct Messages, in a bid to attract a swathe of new users without alienating the loyal fans who’ve been around since the beginning.

There are now around a billion people logging into Facebook every single day, and yet there are areas where Twitter offers a better experience: Breaking news and live events, for example. Its engineers will be watching to see if user polls can help it keep up with its rivals — they should prove particularly popular for celebrities and brands, two types of users Twitter wants to do its utmost to attract.

[Image courtesy of rvlsoft/Shutterstock.com]

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Dave is a freelance journalist from Manchester in the north-west of England. He's been writing about technology since the…

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