The instant polling platform PopTip which launched in June last year for Twitter has just made good on its promise to build out a Facebook version.
Wish you’d thought of it?
Not to put too fine a point on it, PopTip is the kind of product that leaves chief technology officers, product managers and business development associates saying, “I wish I’d thought of that.” Brands can use its dashboard to ask questions about a product, which are then posted straight onto Twitter. Nike, for example, can tweet an image of a new shoe design and ask followers what color they’d like to see it in. Even if followers don’t spell too well or they accidentally use the wrong hashtag, PopTip tracks every single response to the brand’s question.
Even though Facebook has its own polling product, PopTip is well poised to be the product of choice amongst many brands because it lets them post media along with their question. Once a brand makes a Facebook post, PopTip collates and indexes every response comment. As soon as a brand signs up to the platform, every single word crossing its social channels gets indexed by the service. But to make sure that brands don’t end up congesting their PopTip dashboard, the platform only delivers results to questions specified by the brand as “PopTippable.” Even if brands didn’t originally go through the PopTip dashboard, though, they can still ask to see information on other posts.
A price worth paying
The dashboard has been refashioned but it continues to look in two directions at once. The front-end dashboard lets followers see the results of any PopTip poll they’ve taken part in, while the back-end dashboard faces the brands, who can watch the answers coming back in realtime.
Brands pay $1,000 per month per handle, and now they also get a Facebook connection through a Twitter handle for that sum. That means they don’t get an exclusively Facebook tracking service for their money, they get hooked up for tracking with both Twitter and Facebook.
The price tag isn’t putting brands off: the 15 who have already signed up are seeing response rates of 10 per cent to their PopTip questions – a pretty darned impressive result given that the typical response from followers to brand social media is 1 per cent.