Have you ever thought about creating interactive experiences for your company and customers that can really convert? Turns out live polls are just the right solution if you want to actively engage your audience, gather feedback effortlessly and much more – all in a fun and easy way with no downloads required. Today’s focus is on live polls- what they are, how they can help your business and what you can use them for.
What are Live Polls?
Live polls are a type of tool, similar to surveys and questionnaires, that allows you to ask questions and get responses, with the difference being that it happens in real time. Similar to other solutions, live polls are commonly used for various purposes like gathering feedback during company meetings, engaging in discussions or increasing social media coverage. Your live poll can be used during a webinar, an online conference, during online classes, or wherever you want – it’s totally up to you.
What are the benefits of using live polls
The benefits of live polls are varied and can significantly improve your company’s performance on various levels: marketing, community engagement for interactive meetings, product development, and other.
Keep reading to find out the exact ways in which live polls can benefit you.
- Live polls are a great way to get feedback from your audience
There are numerous ways to gather feedback from your audience and live polling are one of them. As a matter of fact, they will do great if you’ve struggled with collecting opinions from important to your business people before.
Thanks to their interactivity possibilities, people will be more likely to participate in a live poll (for example during an interactive webinar) rather than fill a boring Google form. A great polling feature is the option to collect and analyse results easily because you get extensive reports that you can quickly draw conclusions from.
- They allow you to create an interactive and engaging experience for your viewers who will appreciate being listened to
Once again, live polls are extremely interactive. People like being part of the creation process, they like to be “useful” and feel like their voice matters – and live polls are perfect solutions to provide this experience.
It’s even better when you don’t need any coding skills or no downloads are required, right? With the right choice, you can have a very engaging and interactive tool with little effort required from your side – just sign up for a tool and you’re ready to go.
- You can customize your live poll to suit your needs
Another great thing about live polls is that you can completely customize them to your needs. This way, you can offer your webinar participants, students or event attendees the best possible experience that will meet your, and their, expectations.
Do you want the poll to run during a Facebook live? No problem. What about a YouTube video? Even easier. The whole building and designing process is simple and intuitive so you don’t have to worry about things going wrong.
- With live polling software you have the ability to host a poll from anywhere in the world using an internet connection – it’s perfect for remote meetings!
Finally, you’ll be happy to hear that live polls can be used literally from anywhere in the world – all you need is a stable internet connection. This gives you the possibility to survey a wide range of people, for example within your remote team, at no additional cost. You don’t need to travel to survey people in specific locations – all you have to do is just share one link and that’s it. You can enjoy a high survey response rate.
What can you use a Live Poll for?
There are numerous purposes you can use live polls or and here are some of them:
- Promote an event, contest, or giveaway by making it interactive
Live polls are powerful tools when you’re trying to advertise a contest, event or some type of a giveaway. The moment you make something interactive and engage people in the creation process, you actually maximize your chance of making a lot more people interested. It’s a much better way to kick off a great start for whatever you’re planning on doing than writing another social media or blog post. Plus, you’re completely in control of every poll question so that you can ask about matters important to you.
- Increase the number of views on your blog posts and videos with polls embedded in them
Speaking of blogs – did you know real-time polling can significantly help build momentum for your articles, as well as various videos? Something as simple as embedding live polls in them can make people a lot more interested. Video integration possibilities will also make your content far more exciting. They’ll be more engaged, will most likely remember the content better and will happily share it with friends and family. Win-win, right?
- Create polls to gauge the opinion of your audience
Companies often have to follow the target audience’s opinions to make sure they produce goods and/or services that meet their demands and suit their needs. If you’re looking to find out what your customers think about a specific topic or product, live polls will allow you to do it quickly and effectively. You can also use a poll everywhere you run training sessions or two-way conversation.
Live polls are much better than conducting market research, for example – they’re cheaper and faster – and who doesn’t like to get important data immediately?
- Engage with readers by asking them what they think about a book, movie, TV show, etc.
If you’re looking to engage with your customers, fanbase or some other audience in general, live polls will also do a great job here. That’s because they’re perfect tools to engage people – think about all the possibilities you have: adding images, sounds, interesting graphs, various formats and more. When you provide such fun and interactive solutions, people are more likely to participate in a discussion and voice their opinions by answering popular questions. Don’t underestimate the power of choice polls in this case.
- Boost social media posts by using Live Polls as part of the marketing strategy
Finally, increasing your social media engagement will become a piece of cake with live interactive polls. All you have to do is set one up, share the poll everywhere on your platforms and boom – you can watch the magic happen. The reason why live polls can help with driving social media strategy is because they’re something unique – everyone has already seen boring posts of plain text, a picture or a short video. A live poll is different and will bring loads of people to your profiles, which is when it’s worth using content moderation software to manage the comments they leave.
What are the best Live Poll Examples?
Live polls can be implemented pretty much anywhere – as long as you find a good way to use them. Below are examples-inspirations of some most common use cases for live polls- the only limit is your imagination.
- Check your student’s knowledge at the end of a lesson
Since polls usually consist of questions, you can use them for any purpose you like, for instance online lessons. It will be a nice way to test your students’ knowledge at the end of classes – all they have to do is scan a qr code and a survey will pop up on their phones.
- Seek opinions about a product
Another way to use a live poll is to ask your product launch live viewers about their opinions. Do they like the product? Would they improve anything? What do they think about the price? You can as them in chat messages, but onsite participants may have better attitude towards polls.
These are important questions that you may want to seek answers to, so why not ask them when you have a large audience in one place, present and live with you during online meetings? Offer a discount code in exchange for filling the poll and you’ll see even better results!
- Vote for the best speaker
How about deciding who did their best during a debate or some other type of online competition? Hosting a rating poll is a quick and efficient way to gather votes in real time and get immediate results. It’s also a way for you to engage your viewers and turn passive listeners into active contributors.
- Decide on the next webinar topic
Why not also let your webinar participants decide on the agenda for your next virtual events? Using polls, you can turn a seemingly unexciting task into something your participants will be eager to join.
How to get the most out of live polls?
Running a live poll is one thing, but getting the most out of it is something completely different. Here’s how you can make sure you get the best from your polls:
- Keep the questions short and simple
Before you start getting results from your surveys, you first need to create the questions. If you want to truly attract people to your poll, you absolutely must make the questions short and simple. We live in a time when people won’t bother answering long and complicated surveys. Time is money and people value it more than anything today – so be quick and straightforward.
The key to getting as many poll respondents as possible is to design it in a way that people instantly think “Ok, I can answer this, let’s go”.
- When you’re done, share it with all your social media followers so they can vote too!
Once you finish designing your poll questions, it may be a good idea to start spreading the word about it. Of course, your live poll may take place during a webinar, workshop or any other live event – but why not notify people about the poll in advance? This way you can get people excited about the initiative you’re doing and get even more people involved!
If you can release some interesting sneak peeks about the poll – that’s even better. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram – you name the place you’re going to promote the poll on – as long the word is out there somewhere you should get even better results. And then, as a follow up, you can send a gift message on Instagram too, or use an efficient LinkedIn scraper to use these leads and insights in your marketing strategy.
- Let the poll run long enough to get accurate answers from participants
A common mistake when doing live polls is not giving the potential respondents enough time to submit their answers. When deciding on how long you want your poll to run for, you should take into consideration things like:
- internet connection and it’s speed,
- the average response time, which increases as questions get longer and more complicated,
- the number of potential respondents,
- possible device problems.
There’s nothing worse than losing people who are genuinely interested in answering your poll because you didn’t allow for enough time to complete it. Remember about this and always make sure everyone gets a shot at participating!
- Use live polls as a way to engage your audience and create discussion pieces, not just as quick surveys
Moving on, the more engaging your live poll is, the more results or instant feedback you’ll get from it – there’s no doubt about that. Instead of doing the poll purely about you, be sure to include some areas for possible discussions – get people talking. Whether it’s including an interesting image, a nice sneak peek (in case of polls about new product launches), it’s always a nice and helpful gesture when you add something extra that will make people excited.
- Always have someone monitoring the poll – Monitor the results of the poll throughout its duration by checking back periodically
Finally, if you truly want to get as much from your polls as possible – be sure to have someone who will be monitoring the poll and its performance for you.
Checking things like average response rate, correct answer rate, the number of respondents, average response time and more will give you insights into things like:
- which questions performed well
- which questions could do with some improvement for incoming answers
- how well your survey is doing in general
and much more. This way, you’ll really be able to take advantage of live polls and their benefits.
Live Polls with YouEngage: how to
If you’re looking for the best live polls out there, we have the perfect fit for you: youengage.me.
Youengage is a solution made for creating interactive experiences – not only live polls, but also quizzes, various surveys, calculators & assessments and more. If you want to make more interactive meetings (and same way more all-hands meetings), here’s a one-stop-shop for you to do so.
With an extremely quick and easy sign up process, you can set your first live poll in literally minutes – all at affordable rates, with various available integrations and even some priority user support!
All in all, we hope you enjoyed this article and learned something new. Live polling is a powerful tool that brings many benefits for both online participants and hosts, so do look into it if you’re after interactive presentations and responsive solutions that will improve your events.
