My First Twitter Poll

I am always looking at different ways to do things on Twitter. I like the buzz of interaction especially with other SMEs but I’m also trying to build up my contact level for other pharmacies and colleagues. I’m amazed that when I meet people whom I am connected to via Twitter face-to-face the ice is already broken. This helps me a lot and gives me confidence.

Over the last few days I voted in a Twitter poll on @Tweetinggoodess Samantha Kelly’s page. After the poll finished I asked Samantha how Twitter polls work out when she runs them. Ever helpful Samantha gave me some advice and I decided to start my own poll. The first question I asked was ‘If your local Pharmacy is on Twitter would you interact with it there?’ The answers were ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ although it’s possible to do up to four answers. The purpose of asking that particular question was to answer a question that had been in the back of my mind for a few days – would Twitter users around the Pearse Street area interact with us if they knew we were on Twitter? A customer had sent me a message a few days previously to say he was on holiday in Malaga, Spain and had a nasal congestion problem. What could I recommend? This had never happened to me before and got me thinking ‘How many of my customers are active Twitter users?’. This is a question for another blog though.

When I set the poll up I set it to run for three days. The reason I picked that timespan was because I was hoping to use the hashtag #Pharmacyhour which runs every Monday night from 7 to 8pm to spread the poll. I thought also if I left 24 to 36 hours after that to allow for the tweet to circulate. Also there are a number of my Irish colleagues who are on Twitter who I asked to share the tweet. I’m lucky that there is a small group of Pharmacists who have the same mindset as me and we all help each other.

The results are now in. As you can see from the screenshot below 92 votes were cast:

78% of people would interact with their local pharmacy if they knew they were on Twitter. This is a great starting point for me. After I’m finished here I am going to brainstorm ideas and questions to ask these people. Likewise for the remainder I have questions I’d like to ask them. I intend to use a subsequent poll to ask these questions.

Overall, I had a very good experience with Twitter polls and have already tweeted another poll. This poll was about which platform a customer would most likely interact with a Pharmacy. It has been pointed out to me that by doing this poll on Twitter it will skew the results towards Twitter. I take the point but in this case the result is only 50% of the story. The remainder is learning how to set up and run Twitter polls. If anyone has any ideas how I can use Twitter polls further or has experience with them I’d love to hear from you.