You may have noticed that several social media applications are constituting the polls/surveys feature as part of their provisions. At its core level, polling is a prudent and powerful tool as it represents a comprehensive social strategy.
In most cases, their incorporation into apps is motivated by marketing campaigns where business people, brands, companies or ordinary users have access to free product or service feedback. In other words, companies spend a lot of money to come up with a model that allows them to collect concrete feedback about their services and products. However, the ability to ask users or clients about the quality of a given product in social media fan pages or groups exempts them from spending on a marketing strategy. Facebook is an excellent example that offers this functionality where followers and listeners can give the best of feedback based on their interactions with a particular product.
Another reason why polls are crucial is that they diversify the understanding of a given situation in real time. Take the Twitter polls for example; its implementation allows the engagement and entertainment of the Twitter audience. Moreover, brands use this tool for the mentioned purpose where engagements are acted upon based on immediate responses rather than tweets, retweets, and replies that engage users for an extended period. Still, Twitter provides a comprehensive polling system where people vote anonymously for up to four options that can be stretched to 7 days.
To build a community, it is essential that a unique technique is devised to make way for constructive engagements and curiosity in terms of conversations. This is another reason why polls are growing because they impart a sense of togetherness with their brands of choice since the mode of communication is open ended. It shows that a brand is open to what people have to say, and because results are conveyed in real time, clients feel appreciated that their suggestions are taken care of.
Alongside the mentioned merits of polls in pushing a business perspective is the issue of consistence. Fans and followers are inherently attracted to brands that conducts surveys consistently. For instance, even organizations with a large fan-base struggles to entice users to go through their profiles since majority of those fans scroll through news feeds
with the hope of catching the latest piece of information from all accounts they follow.
Moreover, polls have also been used in chat apps such as Facebook Messenger, Google Allo and my personal favorite, Telegram. Additionally, polls in Telegram are powered by bots, which gives them unique options to incorporate a variety of functions. By the same token, several stand-alone apps focus on polls only. They include Poll Everywhere that includes PowerPoint presentations, Votter for scientific assessment, among many others.
The bottom line is that polls provide an excellent platform to gauge products and services. This is augmented by the powerful nature of online polls that have been baked into social media apps by businesses. What is more, their constitution in social media platforms makes it easy for users to access them, which gets rid of the reluctance that people have when filling in online surveys. Similarly, the ease of use of these polls strips the need to provide personal information before casting a vote; you only need to make a selection of a preference without going to an external website. Last but not least, the negative stigma associated with a traditional polling structure is taken away.
