As part of their ‘turning a profit’ attempt, Twitter is experimenting with polls and adding more options in hopes to increase their number of active users, that is reportedly still painfully low compared to other social media platforms. Then again, anyone would have a hard time competing with Facebook.
- Twitter is under pressure to turn a profit, prompting changes
- The Twitter polls are now available to a only verified users
- They feature one question with two possible answers
- The polls are live only for 24 hours
The company is facing heavy amount of pressure from shareholders to start making more profit, which has led to multiple changes on the popular platform. Its name is out there, there are users often using its services, but the problem mostly occurs in the fact that those actively involved are a small percentage of the twitterverse.
In fact, it’s more often that companies and celebrities take to Twitter when it concerns their urgent need to publically and digitally report their news, or add a quip, but the social media platform needs more than that. Without the average users logging in and actually posting, its wings are slowly faltering.
Recently, Twitter has gone through several modifications, including expanding their 140 character limit in order to better accommodate longer tweets. However, that does takes them one step further away from their original goal: quick, short and instant messages. Few people are likely to read long posts on Twitter.
Project Lightning was announced earlier on this year, which will allow users to live tweet during events or breaking news over the internet. It might be a useful feature of bringing the community together over an interesting occurrence, but it’s still in development.
In the meantime, Twitter introduced polls to be embedded directly into tweets, rather than have people make use of the Twitter Cards, which allows attaching of richer photos or other type of media. The purpose is simple and the polls are even more basic than that. They feature only two options, and participants have just 24 hours to place in their vote.
So far, the option is only available to a limited number of users while the company experiments with the new feature. It’s seemingly restricted to Twitter employees and users with verified accounts that have the blue check mark of validation. The option could be indeed useful for certain brands doing a quick market research.
Or it could become the bane of a user’s existence in the twitterverse when their feed will be filled with polls once the option becomes available to everyone.
For now, though, access is restricted and enabled only for the web and mobile versions of Twitter, meaning that apps like TwitterDeck have been left out.
Image source: thedrum.com
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