Yesterday, Instagram launched a new feature on Instagram Stories which allows you to create an interactive poll with two customisable options. After updating the app, you’ll see a ‘poll’ sticker available, where you can ask a question and create two options for your followers to choose from. Results are collected in real-time and are available for 24 hours, like the story itself.
As well as being a fun way for people to interact with friends and get opinions from their peers, it’s also a great way for brands to communicate with their followers and gain invaluable insight into their fan’s preferred products/services.
As a business, you can use this new feature in a number of ways:
1. You can encourage user interaction by asking questions related to trending topics. ‘Will you be getting the new iPhone or Samsung?’, ‘Are you Team Daenerys or Team Cersei?’. Whilst these may not be relevant to your business, they encourage your fans to interact with your stories, which reinforces brand recognition.
2. Polls are a quick way to get feedback from your followers that can help you make business decisions. ‘What products would you like to see?’, ‘What content would you like to see more of?’. These types of questions help you identify what you should be doing to appeal to a majority of your followers.
3. Discovering product preferences is possible via Instagram polls, simply ask what product/service people prefer. ‘Pizza Fries or Garlic Fries?’, ‘Purses or Handbags?’, ‘Do you prefer this dress in red or white?’. These are great questions to ask to find out what products are most popular, revealing which ones should be focused on and marketed further.
4. Ask lifestyle questions that are indirectly related to your business in order to find out more information from your audience without being too direct. A dog walking company could ask, ‘Where do you prefer to walk your dog, Beach or Field?’. This would help the dog walker know where their customers would prefer to have their dogs walked, without being too formal.