Social networks can be an interesting place to recruit participants who are interested in your website, product or service, to participate in a short test.  Usabilla offers some simple ways to promote your tests on Facebook and Twitter by posting the URL of your test and a short message on these social networks. You can also use the Redirect URL in Usabilla to make it easy for your participants to invite other participants and trigger a small viral effect.

Promote your test on Twitter & Facebook

In the promote dialog of your Usabilla tests you’ll find links to invite your contacts on Facebook and Twitter to participate. These links redirect you to Twitter and Facebook, with the following sample message:

Please help us to improve our website. Share your opinion: http://usabilla.com/rate/1234567890 #usabilla #usability

The standard Twitter message is tagged with the hashtags #usabilla and #usability. You can change the text of your message before you post it to Twitter or Facebook. Just use your test URL and provide some additional information about your test.

Ask participants to invite participants

Another interesting way to spread your test is to redirect your participants after your test to Twitter with a predefined message. The Redirect URL of your test is the target destination users are being redirected to after they’ve finished your test. You can customize your Thank-You page and ask participants to help spreading the test by posting a message on Twitter.

An URL can’t contain any special characters or spaces. So to create a ‘Post to Twitter’ link you’ll need to URL encode your message. You can do this by using this simple online tool. You use your encoded message to create an URL that looks like this:

http://twitter.com/?status=Help+to+test+the+Firefox+homepage.+ One+task%2C+10+seconds%3A+ http%3A%2F%2Fusabilla.com%2Frate%2F15940513564b1++%23usabilla+%23usability

The first part (’http://twitter.com/?status=‘) sends a user to Twitter, with the second part (your URL encoded message and test URL) filled in as message on the Twitter homepage.