Tweets are fun, but there’s other interesting data that comes along with using the 140 character sharing social network. Ever wonder where your Twitter followers are from? Tweepsmap will tell you exactly that.

The app analyzes the data your followers have entered into their bio and drops all of the information on a Google Map. I was actually pretty surprised by where my followers are from.

Just authorize the app, which takes a few minutes, and you’ll see blue markers spread out all over the world.

Coast to Coast Followers

After I authorized the app with my Twitter account, I was impressed with how fast the data was displayed on a Google Map.

You can zoom in like you would on any other Google Map and see the locations that follow you the most based on Country, State, or City. The app told me that 65% of my followers live in the United States, while most of them are in major U.S. cities like San Francisco and New York City.

While this information won’t really change how I use Twitter, I could see how brands could use this app to help them plan out when to tweet certain content, based on which timezone they’re most popular in. It could also help content providers decide to come up with an international approach to their publishing, if a lot of their followers are outside of English-speaking locations.

Where are most of your Twitter followers from? According to Tweepsmap, a lot of my friends in NYC care about what I have to tweet. Guess I should start getting up earlier in the morning to talk to them, since I live on the other coast.

➤ Tweepsmap

Polling software like GoPollGo and HeyCrowd are a great way to ask your Twitter followers what they think about a certain topic. Unfortunately it requires them to leave Twitter to answer.

Pollowers is an app that takes that fact into consideration, and allows people to participate in your poll simply by replying with an option number. The app does all of the hard work for you, so don’t worry about tabulating the results.

The app is super simple to use, and you can start your first poll within seconds of signing in with your Twitter account.

Dear Followers…

While other apps require users to click a link and head to a landing page to answer your poll, Pollowers is only for use on Twitter. For example, you could post your GoPollGo question on Facebook or Google+, but that won’t be the case with Pollowers.

All you have to do is authenticate your account with Twitter, and set up your first poll. Simply add a question, and as many options as you want. Remember that the shorter the poll is, the easier it will fit in a tweet. Once you’ve done that, there is a whole host of automated advanced settings to make sure you get as many votes for your poll as possible.

You can have tweets go out as often as you want, and automate one as soon as the poll has been closed. Remember to check these options and think them through though, otherwise you’ll be spamming your followers and might have to set up a poll called “Why did you unfollow me?”.

The beauty of Pollowers is that all your followers can participate simply by replying to your tweet with one of the numbers assigned to a poll answer. The app pulls the replies back to your results in real-time, making this a true set it and forget it app.

I can tell that people on Twitter would rather respond in this way, rather than clicking a link, because I’ve gotten a handful of responses within minutes of posting my poll about Thanksgiving.

If you’re ready to pull in the wisdom of the Twitter crowds, and aren’t worried about what your friends on Facebook and Google+ think, then Pollowers is worth giving a shot. Just don’t set it to tweet every 20 minutes like it suggests.

What is your favorite Thanksgiving food?

➤Pollowers

If you’re an author and decided to take the markup steps that Google+ announced a while back, your Google+ follower numbers are showing up next to your profile in Google search results.

In June, Google explained the new markup language this way:

We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.

A source confirmed that the next step of that feature, actually showing the number of Circles you’re in on Google+ in Google search results has been turned on.

The results look something like this, so if you’re searching for people or content on Google, you may spot this in the wild:

If you’d like to add this information to your site or blog to have the number of Circles you’re in to show up in results too, Google has set up a help center area to give you a hand.

While this is great for authors, we think that most Google+ users would want to turn this on for themselves, so hopefully Google makes that a feature for all soon, without having to do any coding on a website.

Would you even want this information to appear in Google search results or would it creep you out? Let us know in the comments.