The Power of the Tweet

Until recently I hadn't found a particularly compelling reason to use Twitter. Some of my colleagues raved about it but it just didn't interest me. Recently, however, I found a good use for Twitter - recruiting for a user research study.

We were looking for people to evaluate a website for a client who sells natural products. It is a niche market and I wasn't sure how easy it was going to be to find people, especially as I needed a mix of Canadians and Americans. Luckily our client was on Twitter and had connections with related companies that were also active on Twitter. They suggested that they could post on Twitter and we'd see if we could get enough participants. We decided to try it.

First I created an online survey that we would use to screen potential participants and then our client got a related company to post to Twitter about the study with a link to the survey. Then our client retweeted the message. It was great - within the first hour we had 30 people take our survey. By the end of the day I had close to 80 people sign-up. We left the survey open over the weekend and when I closed the survey, we had over 100 potential participants.

I was easily able to recruit the twelve participants for the study and get a good mix of people. I guess I can't knock Twitter anymore