Saturday 4 April 2015

Fair votes on Twitter

You've probably seen them - Tweets saying RT for A, Fav for B, or similar.

Unfortunately, this approach will always produce very skewed results as the people that follow the Tweeter are only going to see their RTs, not their Favs, so the RT option has a very strong advantage over the Fav option.

What we really want to do is retweet the question but collect the response a little differently.

The easiest way to do this is to ask folk to RT Only for A, but to RT & Fav for B - the total RTs minus Favs gives the A result & the number of Favs gives the B vote.

Because the question is retweeted each time there is no skew to one option or the other. To recap-

RT Only for A.

RT & Fav for B.

Total A = all RTs minus all Favs,

Total B = all Favs.

A Twitter vote done this way is both fair and easy, once you've tried it :-)

There's another example here.