How Social Polls Can Help You Engage With Your Audience

Polls are a traditional marketing tactic that have been used for decades. On social media, polls are a way to amplify engagement. Given the speed at which social media moves, many businesses struggle to keep up. Polls can help with this by giving your followers something to interact with and respond to.

Polls on social media are easy to work with. Take a trending event and add a tweet or post with various radio buttons that your followers can use to vote. Allow them to comment and share their opinion as well. The purpose of these polls is to create effective engagement and let followers communicate with the brand or businesses in an open way.

Here’s how social media polls can be an effective engagement activity.

1. Know Your Customers

It is crucial to understand what your audience perceives about you and your product. If they like it, why, and if they don’t, what can you do better? On social media, your audience is a mix of existing customers and potential customers. Use polls to understand what your audience thinks.

You can set up polls that invite your audience to talk about your brand or product. Ask what they like the best or ask them for reasons why they would recommend your product. Once you have your questions ready, put them on Twitter or Facebook, add related radio buttons and your poll is ready to go.

2. Have a Fun Engagement

Your audience doesn’t want to read about your product, your achievements or your new blog all the time. You need to stop making it “all about you” and give your audience something they would enjoy and share on their own.

Use current affairs or any trending topic you think your audience will find amusing. Twitter and Facebook make this easy by showing trending topics under their “trending hashtag” and “trending now” sidebars individually.

3. Get Feedback on New Features

Another way to understand your customers and what they want is by posting polls on upcoming or new features. Feedback allows you to understand how your customers like the new features or if they wanted something else.

For a new feature, run the poll using basic “like” or “dislike” options. For upcoming features, show your followers three or four different ones and ask them to pick what they would like to see.

4. Invitation on Company Events

Polls are a great way to promote an upcoming event you are hosting or an event you are attending. Create a simple RSVP with radio buttons: “Attending – yes/no.” You’ll quickly find out who you’ll be meeting.

Another use for the poll is to plan your event around the audience’s likes and dislikes and via data saved on your CRM. If you are attending an event as an exhibitor, you will know how many people will visit your stall and you can stock goodies or giveaways accordingly.

5. For Research Purposes

To gain insights about your audience and their buying patterns, add a product list or features that might interest them to see what they like most and least. You can use random polls as well, asking if they prefer communications by phone or email.  This gives you more crucial information for your database.

6. Polls to Push Traffic to Your Website

To push traffic to your website or landing page, create questions around your product and make a quiz using WordPress quiz plugins or quiz makers. Post a question or two from the quiz on social media with a link back to your website. Consider a quiz based around “types of question you need ask yourself before creating social media polls” and use those questions to drive traffic back to your original landing page.

7. Know the Content They Like

Ask your audience to vote on the topics they want you to cover. Use the results to inform your blog calendar. You can also use old articles and poll your audience on which is best to understand what type of content they find worth reading and create new content aimed at that.

8. Use it for lead generation

Interactive polls and quizzes can be a fun and engaging way to generate leads. By creating polls and quizzes that are relevant to your target audience, including a lead capture form (this could be as simple as asking for the participant’s email address or phone number), offering incentives, and following up with participants, you can collect valuable contact information and build relationships with potential customers. A great example of lead-generating quizzes is from DoFasting, as answering quiz questions leads people to an offer to get their app.

Coming up with social poll ideas is not a tough task. The difficulty comes from ensuring your polls are engaging and not too time-consuming. Your audience needs something quick and clear. Consider how time sensitive your topic is. Get a poll published right away if you see something actionable trending. Add relevant hashtags wherever necessary. Keep this in mind and you are ready for social polls.