Put The Poll Into Practise

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If you don’t know much about them already then read on to find out what Instagram polls are and how to use them for your business.

One of the most powerful features that Instagram stories offer is the Instagram poll sticker. These can be used to gather your customer’s opinion on something. Essentially, this can work as a simple way of market research that doesn’t require your followers to think too much.

You don’t need to be a big business to benefit from Instagram polls; say you’re an amateur carpenter and you want to find out if people would be interested in buying your pieces, once you have a small (but relevant) following you can use your stories to promote your work and ask questions like ‘would you buy this for your house?’ or ‘would you want to have a desk like this?’ etc using the poll feature. It works like an easily accessible customer survey that causes no inconvenience to your customers.

You can see how many people voted to give you an understanding of how many of your followers actually feel that way which is useful to you as you could have 100% votes for yes from 2 people or 100.

Once people have placed their vote, they can see what percentage of people voted the same or opposite to them. However, unlike you, those taking part can’t see who voted or how many were involved.

After 24 hours, the story will disappear to your followers however it will remain in your archive where you can look at the story and see your results. *See the examples below for how it works and where to find your archived stories.

Click on the icon that is pointed at in this image. It can be found on your profile in the top right corner of the screen.

A list of options then appears; you want to select ‘archive’ with the clock and backwards arrow icon.

When you’re in your archive, make sure you are on stories and not posts by selecting the text at the top and clicking on ‘Stories’.

Go back through your archived Instagram stories to find the one with your desired poll. Once you’ve then clicked on it, you’ll be shown the post and the percentage of each answer

Swipe your finger up on the screen. You then get a page that looks something like this. The circle is highlighting how many people have viewed your story which is shown with the eye icon. To the right of that, you’ll see three more icons. The downwards arrow will save the story to your photo album. The upwards arrow will turn it into an Instagram post and take you to the upload page. The final one is quite self-explanatory I hope. Below all of these, you can see how many votes you got for one answer and how many you got for the other. Below that, a subtle (joke) call to action that reads ‘Share Results’. That will take you onto the next image, however, if you keep scrolling you will be able to see the users that have voted on your poll and below that, the users that have seen your story.

You can now re-post your story with the results for your followers to see. You may want to this for many reasons, some being that you may want to show off a little, it might have been a few months and you want to remind people of a certain topic your brought up, maybe it’s to show why you are or aren’t doing something, for example, a lot of Social Influencers will ask their followers if they should create YouTube videos. In this case, you could re-post the results to show that because you got so many ‘YES’ answers, you are going to make a YouTube account.

From the results, you can create reports or summaries based on what you’ve found out and then make informed decisions about what to do next.

Using the Instagram poll feature, you can drive people to your website. From the example below, you can see that 77% of people wanted the coffee table so knowing this information you can then leave them to your website with the swipe-up link, taking them to that product page.

Instagram Tips and Tricks

Instagram Highlights

Instagram Quiz Sticker

Instagram Countdown Sticker

Instagram Hashtag Sticker

Instagram Location Sticker

Instagram Question Sticker

Instagram Emoji Slider Sticker

*This is the same for all other stickers that you can gain data from. This process is also subject to change. Instagram, like all online platforms, updates regularly so the location of your archive folder may alter.