Polling features for users can now be found across all major social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. It’s no secret that brands can use polls as a measuring tool but is that the only purpose they serve? You may be surprised at the variety of data polls can measure and the ways in which you can use them to supplement your social media marketing strategy.

Social Listening

Polls are an indispensable social listening tool. From generating feedback to gauging sentiment, polls can be used to provide an overview of community opinion. Pro tip: never underestimate the power of negative feedback. It’s easy for brands to want to focus solely on the positives, and nobody wants to draw attention to their own shortcomings, but there is a way to phrase polls to indirectly collate this kind of feedback. Try asking users what could be improved about a product or service instead of what they don’t like about it. Once you have an idea of what your audience is dissatisfied with/dislikes you can start working towards rectifying it.

Engaging an Audience

The great thing about polls is that their sole purpose is to drive engagement. They can’t exist without audience interaction and, out of all social content, audiences are most likely to interact with something that directly asks their opinion. Engaging with your audience is a fantastic way to generate ideas to the benefit of your marketing strategy. Polls literally give you the option to directly ask your audience what they want.

There are plenty of different ways to use polls to engage an audience besides asking their opinion. Polls can be used in a playful capacity to entertain audiences whilst engaging them. You can tap into your audience’s competitive side by using polls as tests of trivia. For example, Jelly recently ran a poll on behalf of client Konami UK asking what one of their famous character’s name means in English. This particular poll yielded circa 1K individual votes and encouraged a wider discourse amongst the community regarding the character and the game they feature in.

In our Marketing Transparency blog post we noted that 43% of Britons distrust big brands or corporations, associating them with greed and deceit. Engaging with your audience by showing your brands personality and sense of humour is a great way to humanise your brand and earn your audience’s trust.

Incorporating Polls into Your Marketing Strategy

There are two key ways brands can incorporate polls into their wider marketing strategies. The first is using polls to drive creative direction by allowing your audience to submit their ideas. This might entail asking your audience for their preferences on a particular theme for a campaign or event and building it around their preferences. Allowing an audience to give its input down to the little details makes for an almost entirely personalised and targeted strategy.

Alternatively, brands can use polls to supplement their existing strategies. A strong example of this is a recent activation by fast food brand Burger King. Burger King’s core message is “Have It Your Way” and they recently used Instagram’s Stories poll feature to allow users to create a custom Whopper burger. By using nine different stories featuring the burger’s various ingredients users could generate a unique coupon, sent via direct message, which could be used to redeem their personalised Whoppers for free.

Burger King then used the data collated from the polls to work out the most popular ingredient combination to add a limited-edition item to its menu called The InstaWhopper. This activation generated over 270K user engagements and 5K new followers (source) for the brand whilst perfectly aligning with its existing strategy by literally allowing followers to have it their way.

Bottom line? Your audience is integral to every move your brand makes on social media so it’s worth using every tool at your disposal to boost interest and engagement. Consumers are far more likely to engage with something offline – like a product or event – if they’ve engaged with it online first. Polls are an excellent way to drive engagement that goes beyond the humble like by generating conversation and opening up a discourse around a brand.

Want a bespoke, resulted-orientated, social media strategy with strong creative content and fresh ideas? Get in touch now.