Barbecue chicken outlet tries to answer the age old question – which came first, the chicken or the tweet?

An Australian barbeque chicken company has placed a keyboard inside a henhouse, in an publicity stunt aimed at getting a chook to tweet out a comprehensible word.

Betty, the innovative bird, is now unknowingly vying for a Guinness World Record as she walks over the keyboard, the resulting collection of random characters and letters then published to the Twitter feed of @ChickenTreat along with the hashtag #ChickenTweet.

Australian company Chicken Treat is behind the publicity stunt.

In order to qualify as the first chicken in the world to tweet, the plucky animal needs to bash out a four-letter word that is recognised by English language dictionaries.

None of Betty’s obscure tweets, which look like muddled physics equations or malfunctioning HTML codes, are yet to qualify as discernable words.

Their lengths vary, from two letters to an entire paragraph of jibberish, likely depending on her mood or just where she rests her beak.

The attempt, which began on October 8, stops every night as the keyboard is removed from the pen and Betty gets some shut-eye - until the rooster crows, of course.