Your audience wants to feel heard, but are you listening to them in a way that also helps your brand? Collecting consumer feedback, demographic points or opinions through polls and surveys provides you with a goldmine of information that will inform your next product or campaign. The act of gathering this feedback, however, is easier said than done. It’s why we opt to include a deal incentive or chance to win a prize in order to have our questions answered. We want information, but we don’t want it to be a chore for our valued community members. Thankfully, an increasing number of platform functions and polling software are making it easier for us to stay creative while collecting the responses we’re looking for from our audience.
Polling features available on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr can make it possible to gather information in real-time by delivering your question to everyone’s dashboard or feed. Social polling gives us answers from engaged community members who want to talk to us—and we want to hear what they have to say. These are fans and followers who we want to have long relationships with.
Twitter polls are easy to create from anywhere (including mobile), allowing your followers to respond to your question by picking one of two answers. This is great for yes or no, a or b questions. Users who took the time to respond to your poll question are engaged members of your audience who will interact with you and want to share their opinions. You can have meaningful discussions with them and maintain long-lasting relationships.
Facebook polling apps allow more in-depth answers for questions, allowing many options as potential answers. If you prefer to skip the Facebook app-installation, you can also ask a question in your post and measure the results based on comments. Facebook’s interface makes this a particularly good platform to do this, because comments are easily viewed below your post. Similarly, YouTube is a perfect place for vloggers or content creators to request answers in the video comments. This may not be the most time-efficient method for larger online communities, but it will provide visual information that can be used for future decisions.
Live chats or webinars are a perfect way to gather valuable information off of social media. Platforms like LiveChat can give users a pre-chat survey to fill out. Users in Q&A sessions or topical discussions can give detailed answers while you can tailor questions based on how the discussion goes. In a webinar presentation, Clickmeeting’s features include polls for attendees to answer before revealing a “results slide” to see if they’re able to predict the outcomes. Not only does this tell you who your audience is, but it keeps them interested in your topic and anticipating what you’ll say next.
Integrating your survey or poll with a user’s experience on your site is another reliable way to learn about your community. Ask a question to site visitors right off the bat or have them create an account with a space to fill in an answer to your question. You can alter the times and location of where these surveys exist on your site, testing what works and what can improve by switching them up. Before checking out of an e-commerce store or before playing a video, you may also ask a few fun questions before users move on to the next page. Sites like SurveyMonkey and Wedgies make it easy to create highly customized questions that you can embed and link to your social accounts. Your questions and answer options are entirely up to you and you can make them as interesting as you’d like while switching up the method of questions asked; multiple choice, A/B, fill in the blank, the options are endless.
If you keep your surveys or polls relatively short and sweet, you shouldn’t worry too much about scaring your customers and leads away. They’re already on your site and are there to learn more. A one-time pop up survey is easy to complete and can be a great way of finding out basic information without users feeling like they’re giving too many details to use your site. Ask your users a question that might be off-topic: “Do you prefer unicorns or dinosaurs?” plus one demographic question.
Surveys are a dialogue between you and your customer, so it’s also an opportunity for you to make an impression with the questions you ask and the way you ask it.
