Twitter Data Hacking: A Recipe to Yield Better Startup Insight

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@ kennymuli Kenny Li Investment Analyst @ SenseTime. Founder of Worthyt. MIT Sloan 2020.

Stop asking your friends to fill out your business surveys on Facebook, you’re not in college anymore.

This is a technique we’ve been using a lot at Worthyt recently to gain better audience insight faster than we can knocking our heads around a meeting room. Hopefully, you’ll be able to really leverage this technique for your own startup endeavors, or just to gain better overall insight into particular markets.

The Triumvirate

What’s the most important resource for a startup? A naive person might argue that it’s money. The textbook answer is time. But the reality is, the most important resource for a startup is a triumvirate among money, time, and a critical third piece — data.

Without data, you’re blind. And if you think that’s not a problem that money or time can’t solve, try this: pretend you have a million dollars, give yourself all the time you need, and walk to your closest grocery store — with your eyes closed.* Concentrate on the feeling of impending doom rippling down the hairs of your body as you take your third step and realize the importance of data.

*Please don’t actually try this.

Okay, maybe I’m being a bit dramatic in my illustration. But data isn’t just some fancy business jargon that suit-and-tie men throw around to verbally joust each other for a shot at the corporate throne — it’s a vital component to fully understand your customer/user, which ultimately leads to building the best available product on the market.

But as a fledgling startup, data is hard to come by. Usually, professional studies can fall far beyond the budget of an MVP-stage business idea, and attempts to collect your own insight relies on the echo chamber of your Facebook peers that gleam your status update by chance while scrolling through their newsfeeds — yes, the update where you describe how you would be eternally grateful if they could just take two minutes of their time to complete a really short survey that will help the business out tremendously.

Enter Twitter. One of those social media platforms that most people wonder, including myself, why it even exists. At best, it will be known throughout history as the single tool of the 21st century that helped turn the tides of U.S. international relations — which is an impressive feat, if you think about it. But despite your best or worst judgment of the social media tool, it’s arguably the most powerful one in existence for startup hackers to, well, hack together data.

The Data Souffle Recipe

Just like all recipe blogs on the Internet, mine had to also start with an elaborately irrelevant introduction. But you were probably smart enough to know that already, so you skipped straight to the meat without entertaining my verbal foreplay.

On the other hand, you might’ve gone through the surprisingly insightful introduction and learned a few things about the importance of data. In fact, you might even be wondering if this is another copious trap, sort of like a book’s preface followed by an introduction. But alas, no. The journey ends where the data begins! Here’s the recipe:

One Twitter Poll A Target Demographic $30 (Don’t want to spend the money? Enter your poll idea into AMIpolls.com. If accepted, they’ll run the poll through their network.) A pinch of salt and pepper for taste.

The best part of this recipe is that it works regardless of the number of followers you have. Every 24 hours may yield a few hundred responses to the question you so desperately need an answer to from your audience.

Step 1: Create a Poll

First, you need to create a Twitter Poll. Within the poll, you are able to add up to four responses. You’re also able to choose the length of your poll, which can go down to the minute or as much as half of a fortnite (i.e., a week; i.e., seven days).

The Poll option is a button underneath your Compose new Tweet box.

The Compose new Tweet box after you select the Add Poll option.

Step 2: Find Your Target Audience

Use Twitter Ads. This isn’t a tutorial on using Twitter Ads, so I won’t go into details. If you want to learn more about using Twitter Ads, you can read about it on the Official Twitter for Business website. That being said, keep mindful of a few steps.

First, you’ll need to set a budget. For most cases, $30 should be fine to get more than enough responses to the question you’re asking, especially for 24 hours. There are some high-demand audience targets that will cost more (e.g., YouTubers), but if you are operating on a shoestring budget, then you’ll just have to blur the portrait of your target responder a bit to make the answer fit within your budget; otherwise, you can raise the price to $100 or even more to try to get a better target audience for the high-demand ones.

On the Creatives page (see below), be sure to check the box with your poll on it and only that box. If you check other boxes with other tweets, Twitter is going to run its own algorithms to decide which tweets it wants to advertise. Its algorithms aren’t optimized to get you the most respondents, it’s optimized to get you the most reach, so if your other tweet is deemed better by the almighty algorithm, then you would’ve just wasted time and money. If you have multiple versions of the question you want to ask, my suggestion is that you should run ad campaigns in parallel to guarantee that both are exposed with equal weight.

If you’ve used Twitter Ads before, you know that you can also create a Tweet within the Creatives page, which means you can create a Tweet Poll in there, too. If you decide to do that, be sure to uncheck the Promoted-only box at the bottom.

If you forget to do that, you won’t be able to see the results of your poll until after the poll ends. This is a major disadvantage because, in a startup, you don’t always have the convenience to wait. For example, I set my polls with a 3-day poll length, but I usually stop running it after I collect more than a few hundred responses, because that’s enough data points for me to get a fair picture of what consumer opinion may be.

Do not leave the Promoted-only box checked!

On the next page, you’ll be able to really narrow down your Target Audience. This is where you get to specify things such as the gender, age, location, and interests of a person you want to target. This is page is important; it’s the only opportunity you’ll have to give Twitter the best description you can of the person you want to ask the question to.

The Targeting page lets you really define your audience.

Personally, I like the more detailed level of targeting you can find on Facebook or Google Ads, but unfortunately, they don’t allow quick, integrated solutions for advertising. On Facebook, you can create a poll, but you aren’t allowed to advertise it — who knows, maybe it’s for the exact reason we’re doing it on Twitter.

Yes, you can further attempt to hack your way with polls on Facebook by offering a link that people click to get to it, but then you’re playing the dangerous game as an advertiser — you must now convince your user to click away from their experience, and any social media marketer can attest to how hard that is.

Step 3: Launch the Campaign

After confirming your campaign, sometimes it takes a bit of time before it actually starts — Twitter may be reviewing it to make sure that it complies with advertising rules. But within an hour or so, you should start seeing traffic and responses to your poll.

At any time, if you think you’ve gotten enough responses, you don’t need to spend the entire budget that you allocated for the question; instead, you can go back into your Twitter Ads page and pause or cancel your advertisement. After all, you can use that money to get more answers!

A recent 24-hour survey I made; budgeted $30, spent $27.86, got 835 engagements which lead to 550 poll responses

Bonus Round: Comments and Responses

Occasionally, you’ll also receive comments/responses from people that have seen and/or taken your survey. An average chef might see it as just drippings of the truly decadent meal, but you’re certainly not an average chef. Take advantage of the comment. Regardless of what it may be, I recommend one thing: engage!

The more response you can get from users beyond just the vote, the more insight you may have. Some may start off trolling; ask them why they feel this way about the question or idea. I’ve discovered some pretty valuable perspective by just asking.

The Limitations of Twitter Data Mining

Of course, Twitter Polls aren’t an elixir for data scientists everywhere. It certainly comes with its drawbacks. You won’t get the level of complexity that a normal survey can offer, and you also must be aware of the potential contamination in the data.

It’s a One and Done

For one, you can’t ask consecutive questions. Even if you run one question after another, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be hitting the same responders; after all, one ad can have the potential to reach millions, but in a 24-hour period with $30 it may only reach thousands. As a result, questions that try to establish a thought pattern aren’t effective on Twitter. For example, “do people who like A tend to want B or C more?”

Separating Flesh from Bot

It’s no argument that social media platforms have a botting problem, and Twitter is no exception. In fact, according to a study from summer 2017, up to 15% of the entire Twitter population are bots. How artificially intelligent are these bots to have enough conscience to critically think about your question and answer appropriately? Probably none. Furthermore, the verdict is also out as to how much of an impact bots have on Twitter Polls at all — maybe none whatsoever! But keep in mind that bots are out there, and they may or may not be impacting your data.

Where Do You Go From Here?

Stop reading, start mining! I wouldn’t recommend relying on Twitter Polls for the entire existence of your company; as it scales, definitely consider hiring professional polling services or your own data scientists. But on a small startup lifestyle, data, time, and money are a critical triumvirate for the success of your products and company, so you need to get creative about how to collect and save most of those.wYou Got Questions? I (maybe) Got Answers! Reach Out.

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/kennymuli

Give me a ring: https://clarity.fm/kennymuli

Ask Me Anything: https://worth.yt/kenny

Want to get thousands of votes on a poll idea without spending money? Enter your poll idea into AMIpolls.com. If accepted, they’ll run the poll through their network.

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