TweetSwell — the newest player in Twitter applications

It’s hard not to get your feelings hurt when someone un-follows you on Twitter. Just like being un-friended on Facebook, it feels like an undeserved snub. As many who work in social media know, it especially hurts when it’s your job to gain followers for a client.

Twitter is like a more-manic version of Facebook networking – consumer interest only lasts as long as an item appears on their feed and users can remove followers from their list for any fickle reason:  they don’t get the user’s attention, they annoy the user or they just lose interest.

The trick is making Twitter more interactive for the user and spreading the brand name every step of the way. That’s where the new Twitter application TweetSwell comes in.

TweetSwell, still in beta form, is an engine for surveys, quizzes and polls that allows organizations a new way to engage with followers. We’ve been casually playing with TweetSwell for about a month and have been pleased with how interactive it is. We also appreciate the frequency with which the results are re-tweeted, spreading the brand name every step of the way.

How it works: Companies create a survey for the purpose of collecting consumer sentiment, sparking discussion or conducting product reviews. You write and manage the survey, then TweetSwell hosts it and uses your Twitter account’s design settings for a seamless brand experience. Once you publish the survey and promote it on Twitter, respondents can personalize their Twitter responses. TweetSwell collects all the metrics to show how successful the application is.

Other online survey and polling applications exist, including KwikSurveys and SurveyMonkey. For Twitter, however, TweetSwell founder Eric Chang saw an opening.

Chang acknowledges that Twitter-friendly applications already offer surveys and contests: TwtPoll allows you to create branded surveys on Twitter; PollDaddy offers easy, free polls that you can publish on your blog, Web site or social network; and CrowdCampaign allows users to create a contest while promoting a brand.

Where TweetSwell is different, Chang says, is that it focuses on creating customizable tweets from the surveys, so the survey is more engaging and has more marketing potential.

“Many companies have already been using Twitter to collect anecdotal feedback and address consumer questions and concerns,” Chang said. “What’s been missing is the ability to back this anecdotal feedback with some real analytics and do it in an automated way.”

Chang’s focus is twofold: to create deeper analytics for the clients, showing the “social reach” of the brand; and support better incentives for followers to engage companies through Twitter.

There are currently a handful of organizations testing the TweetSwell service. Chang hopes to use their feedback to better hone the design and metrics. One tester is the maker of men’s clothes, Bonobos, which is using TweetSwell to see what its customers want out of a good dress shirt: “Should cuffs have one button, or two?”

Once TweetSwell is officially up and running – sometime early next year – Chang says he’ll have a pricing system in place.

For now, he’s working on developing even more utilities for TweetSwell. He recently included a “roll your own tweets” feature that allows hosts to pre-populate the respondent’s “What’s happening?” box on Twitter, and the ability to add images to the surveys.