Twitip

by Sherice Jacob (follow her at @sherice) from iElectrify

From the makers of Wordpress comes a free way to create polls in minutes – PollDaddy.com. In both free and paid versions, you can use PollDaddy to quickly create a poll or survey for Twitter in just a few simple steps.

Creating a Poll

Once you’ve signed up for a free account, you’re instantly taken to your Account Home where you can create a poll or survey. The difference between the two is that a poll lets you have one type of answer (i.e. a checkbox or a button to click) while a survey lets you go more in-depth with drop down menus, text boxes and such.

The poll creation area also lets you specify a media link (YouTube, Seesmic or an image) if you want to ask people what they think of your new video, new logo idea, and so on). Further down the page, you’ll be able to choose what style you’d like your new poll to have – and if you’re in the mood to customize it, PollDaddy lets you do just that (it requires some knowledge of CSS though, so it’s not for the technical faint of heart!)

On the right side of the page, you’ll see options for a closing date for your poll, whether or not you want to block “repeat offenders” (people who vote more than once and try to skew the results) Once you’ve completed your poll, you’ll be taken to a page with your poll code on it to insert into your website:

Of course, since we want an easy way to add a poll for our Twitter followers, all this code isn’t going to do us any good unless we have a website to put it on. Fortunately, on the right side of the page is a Direct Link Method. Click that, and you’ll be given a simple URL that you can shorten for Twitter with TinyURL or a similar service.

There are also poll plugins and code to add your poll to a Wordpress blog or to your Myspace page. If you’d like to see the finished TwiTip sample poll, go here: http://www.polldaddy.com/p/1323235/

Creating a Survey
Creating a survey is a little more involved. Using a survey gives you more options than a poll does, and with PollDaddy, you can even customize the start and end message your visitor sees when they take your survey. Once you do, you’ll be taken to the survey creation area which lets you drag and drop the different elements to create the finished survey:

Editing your survey is as easy as point and click. Once you’re done editing, click the Organizer tab at the top to move questions up or down. The Branching tab is a little more advanced and is used if, for example, the next question in the survey doesn’t apply to a previous answer or if the respondent didn’t answer the question at all. For more information on how branching works, see the Support Tutorial here: http://support.polldaddy.com/?p=41

To get the final code for your Survey, just click the Surveys dropdown menu at the top, then choose Options under the survey you’ve just created and click the Get HTML Code option.

Just like before, the Direct Link method is the easiest way to put your survey up on Twitter. You can also view reports, edit your questions or close your survey at any time from the “List Surveys” or “List Polls” area.

Now that you know how to create a poll or survey for Twitter, get out there and start asking questions! You may be surprised at what you learn from your followers.