Credit #Facebook.com
Does Polling Engage People on #Social Media? Care To Take Our Poll?
The whole point of using social media is to engage and interact with your followers and fans. Sometimes people can be reluctant to get involved in discussions where they need to add comments or get involved in a conversation, especially if they could feel out of their depth. Sometimes readers simply don’t have time to comment, so may scroll by.
This can be a missed opportunity to reach out and engage with your social media followers, so a great way of garnering their opinion about a subject without the need to actually type in a response or comment, is by providing them with a simple poll.
Polling can be a very powerful tool, and many top brands have used them to with product development, pricing structures and branding designs. Polling can be a very quick and effective way to solve a small hitch during production, or to decide which way to go with an idea to attract more interest.
So, how can small #business owners use polls?
You can use a form of social polling to save yourself some money. Instead of paying out a lot of money to a company to do surveys and market research for you, you can use social polling to listen to the opinions of your followers about your product or service.
People on social media sites choose to follow you because they either like you, enjoy your product, or benefit from your service. They will already think highly of you, so this is were you can get the majority of your most engaging feedback, and they will be happy to do this for free.
Because your fans or followers are already comfortable with you, they will be more than happy to point out any slight niggles or shortcomings they encounter. So you can use their feedback to fix those issues, and make your product or service even more desirable.
Get real-time feedback and instant reactions
Getting direct feedback from your followers can help you understand their current mood, and their first impressions of you. Polls enable people to feedback to you with their instant reactions. A simple click of a multiple choice poll will give you more of an indication of how a new idea or a change will be received.
Given more time to think about their reaction, many people may change their minds and come around to your way of thinking, but if you rely on impulse buying for your business, then a poll will give you a better idea of the instant impact it carries.
Having a deep insight into your followers and web visitors can help you plan your long-term goals, and also help to design your #marketing campaign with plenty of ideas already in mind.
Tie your polls in with what is currently trending
There may be a big sporting event coming up, such as the football or rugby world cup, or a popular seasonal holiday such as Christmas or the New Year. Make use of these popular events by working them into your polls.
Find out their preferences
Let’s say you want to create and App for your business. A poll could easily help you find out that most of your followers prefer android to iOS, so you can decide to make an android App first because it will be more popular.
Build Your Community
You don’t have to have a specific reason to post a poll. You can simply run some for fun just to help keep your social followers – well, social! The last thing you want to do is to make all your social media post and polls mini sales pitches. Invite your followers to join in with the fun!
Polls can give you ideas
You may be surprised by the results of your polls, or you may not. Either way, they can give you plenty of ideas to create content around. Depending on the questions you ask, and the feedback and feeling you receive, you can come away from a single poll with an idea or two about a follow up article or blog post for your website. Simply sharing the results of your poll and giving your opinions on the results can a piece all by itself.
Polls can boost your traffic
By offering your readers and followers a fun poll, and then encouraging them to share the poll with friends, you can end up attracting some fresh followers to your website, blog, or social media sites.
Quite a bit of research has been conducted on how polls can increase traffic, and on average it has been found around 20% of your readers will vote on the poll, then around 15% of those voters will go on to share it with their own network. This works out at around a 2-3% share rate for your page or site that contains the poll.
Using regular polls could mean you increasing traffic by around 20% with no extra effort. That has got to be worth trying right?
Facebook have a free poll app that you could practice with, but be careful as the non-ad version does carry a small fee to use.
