Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

Twitter Can Be Used to Effectively Poll the Public

by Terrence O'Brien on May 12, 2010 at 09:10 AM

twitter poll
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently decided to start parsing Tweets, categorizing them by topic and measuring their sentiments, in a way similar to a recent exercise by HP Labs focusing on box office performance. The team was able to analyze this data and produce, in effect, public opinion polls without having to call (annoy) a single person. What's more, the results of this passive polling were quite similar to those obtained from traditional phone-based surveys by Gallup and Reuters.

The scientists collected tweets regarding consumer confidence and presidential approval, and initially noticed that results were far more volatile from day to day than with traditional phone polling. But, when averaged out over a number of days, the Twitter poll matched up rather accurately with existing data (.PDF).

Researchers still have more work to do, but if they can repeatedly produce accurate results, Twitter polling could become a quick and cheap alternative to traditional telephone surveys. Of course, there are biases inherent in using Twitter as a data source; for instance, certain demographics are better represented on Twitter than others. Still, it could prove to be a valuable source of information for marketers, and a valuable reprieve from telemarketing calls for the rest of us. [From: Mashable]

Tags: Carnegie Mellon, CarnegieMellon, opinion, poll, polling, polls, socialnetworking, study, survey, top, twitter

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular