Polls have been popular widgets on blogs and Twitter. Polls on Twitter are effective for real time feedback and mass, yet relevant, reach that can be achieved.

If you want to understand how running polls on Twitter may or may not be right for you, read on for benefits to running Tweet Polls:

1. Find new, smart people to follow. For a productive Twitter experience connections are essential and that means connecting with the right people. Twitter polls should use a common hash tag (ex: #mypoll) that will tie the Questions and Answers together. In doing so, the followers of your poll participants will be exposed to the Q & A and potentially participate

2. To engage with each other create an opportunity for your Twitter network. If you’ve successfully built a network or two or three on the social web, you know it’s not “all about you”. Poll respondents and observers using the common Tweet poll hash tag. It will benefit from the same exposure to interesting insights and people as you will. Successful polls with this objective quickly spawn discussions on various threads related to the original poll questions.

3. Collect from your follower’s great insights and tips. This is an obvious benefit for any poll. Asking the right questions can evoke some very useful tips and perspectives from your Twitter network that can be useful to you as well as the community at large.  You can get tough questions answered that many others are searching for.

4. Crowdsource blog, article or conference presentation content that rewards participants. Asking questions on Twitter and then using the answers in a PowerPoint or blog post is an easy way to generate content. Doing this in a way that recognizes those who contributed ideas via Twitter is even more powerful. Let your network know you’ve used their feedback and list them as contributors in the PPT deck or article. They’ll tweet or re-tweet links back to the content driving even more traffic and attention, often times. People will work for a living, but they’ll die for recognition.

5. Identify potential candidates or consultants on their answers and interaction for hire or marketing partners based. Poll responses show insight from followers that help me get to know them better. Some of which, might be people that would be a great addition to our Social SEO Agency or whom we can hire for certain projects.

6. Build goodwill. Recognize certain Twitter contacts. By dropping questions just for them to answer, then acknowledge their answers you can recognize. This tactic isn’t for everyone and it’s effectiveness is based on real questions and real answers. Manufactured interactions are most often weak and of little value.

7. Attract new followers to yourself that notice the sudden use of a certain hashtag and the Q/A. The polls on Twitter have not been particularly effective for growing a quantity of followers, but the quality (as in relevance of connection) has been very good. The hash tag takes the “conversation” outside of the threaded discussion within your own Twitter network. It is essential though, that the text used in the hash tag make sense towards the topic being discussed. Ex: #blogseo or #veganrecipes or #crmsoftware

8. Attract new followers to your Twitter network through the smarts of their participation. As mentioned in benefit #4, from interacting with each other through participation on Twitter polls you can help your Twitter network gain benefit. When one of your connections answers a poll question, their response can catch the attention of other Twitter users following the hash tag. This extension can lead to more followers for the members.

9. To see which questions to use or what syntax to use in a more formal survey, flush out survey questions on Twitter. Sharing informal survey questions on Twitter can be a very useful litmus test for certain questions, if you are in the business of conducting research on a larger scale. Content, syntax, relevance and timeliness can all be tested. So that the questions used in the formal survey are better suited for response.

Credit: toprankblog , Photo Credit: prospectmagazine