This week Twitter is releasing a new polls feature that allows you to send a tweet and allow people to vote by selecting one of two options.

The folks at Buffer has a great article on Twitter Polls if you need to find out all of the details.

First Test

I have been keeping an eye on my Twitter account since I read the article because Twitter performed a gradual roll-out of the new service. As soon as I saw the poll icon on the create tweet page, I created and sent my first poll. Here is how you know you can create a poll:

Notice the Poll icon?

When you click on Poll, you’ll be shown two additional options:

Polls only have two choices and there is a 20 character limit for each question. Other than that, it’s a normal tweet.

The Results

if you open the twitter site and look at your profile, you should see the results of your poll at the top of the timeline.  Here is what it looks like:

Polls are live for 24 hours and as you can seen in my example, I have 11 votes and the poll will remain active for 11 more hours.  After that, it will not be possible to submit a vote.

Conclusions

I think this is a great feature and I can see it becoming quite a useful tool.  Since there is a 24-hour limit to the poll, you need to use caution when performing the actual post. I would imagine your results will vary based on your audience and the time of day.  Keep of that in mind, as you would any of your social posts.