Twitter is now offering advertisers and brands the opportunity to survey Twitter users directly on the mico-blogging platform.
The new feature, dubbed "Brand Surveys", forms part of Twitter's expanding Promoted Product portfolio, and is aimed at providing advertisers with a means to measure the effectiveness of their Twitter campaigns.
The surveys will appear in the same way as promoted tweets within the user's timeline on mobile and desktop. Twitter's VP of brand strategy, Joel Lunenfeld, explains: "Users may see a Tweet by @TwitterSurveys, inviting them to fill out a survey directly within the tweet itself. Building on Twitter's mobile heritage, we're giving brands the ability to deliver and measure the impact of mobile and traditional desktop campaigns through these surveys."
By clicking on the survey tweet, the message expands in the user's timeline, and brings up a short series of questions. While Twitter gained popularity as a 140-character service, the platform is continually moving towards becoming more of a rich-media platform, which integrates a broad range of content forms - all aimed at keeping consumers within the Twitter ecosystem.
Twitter has partnered with Nielsen to analyse the survey results in order to gain further insights into purchasing intent, awareness and other advertising metrics.
"We're currently working with a small set of advertisers to test this feature, and plan to make it available to additional partners in early 2013," says Lunenfeld.
The micro-blogging platform also recently expanded its targeting features for marketers by allowing for promoted tweets and promoted account campaigns to be targeted at users based on their interests. In the past, advertisers could only target their followers or users who had similar profiles to their existing followers.
Twitter has recently been tightening up control over its ecosystem by cutting off third-party clients and bringing services and features in-house and better monetising its services. As a result, dissatisfaction with Twitter has grown in the developer community and one entrepreneur from San Francisco, Dalton Caldwell, is pushing to create a new service called App.net that will be "what Twitter could have been".
According to Caldwell, Twitter has made a mistake by choosing to monetise the platform through advertising rather than building it around its real-time API. "If you are building an advertising/media business, it would then follow that you need to own all of the screen real-estate that users see. The next logical step would be to kill all third-party clients, and lock down the data in the global firehose in order to control the 'content'," says Caldwell.
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