Last week, Instagram launched a new sticker to upgrade your Stories: Polls! This new, interactive feature allows users to ask questions to their followers and receives quick feedback. Users can choose two possible answers and get creative with the questions. At the Socialfly office, we immediately began testing the feature on our personal accounts, developed creative ideas for clients, and tested the tool on Socialfly’s Instagram. Straightaway, we saw engagement and had answers to our burning questions rolling in!
The beauty of polls is the ability to interact with your audience and get honest (hopefully) opinions. Need a second opinion on an outfit? ASK YOUR FOLLOWERS! Struggling with what to order at a new restaurant? LEAVE IT TO THE POLLS. Should you pay rent this month!? Of course, you should pay rent…would you leave that to your Instagram followers? Anyway, you get the point! This feature allows you to interact with your audience in a more direct way and makes it easy to get immediate feedback from followers instead of asking a question and waiting for a DM response.
Prepare to get some real insights! Currently, the polls are public, meaning the account owner can see how you voted. On last week’s #SocialLIVE, we discussed the decision to keep the opinions public and whether that would change over time to promote more honesty. I believe Instagram will leave the opinions public given their transparency efforts with Influencers.
You can change the two options to whatever makes sense for the question you are asking your audience. We tested this for clients and asked about different options for one of the fashion brands we work with to see outfit ideas for fall. From a brand or business perspective, this feature is incredible to get audience insight at early phases of the design process. For example, a fashion brand could conduct a poll on Stories to get feedback that could inform the popularity of a pattern hence impacting buying decisions and success of the product.
At the moment, you can only see who has participated in your poll while your story is on your feed for the usual 24 hours. I am guilty of looking back through everyone who voted in my first poll and the opinions were pretty hilarious. Eventually, we hope the platform will save these insights and measure them the same way you can view the results of stories for business pages. This would be a great addition to the feature for brands and businesses especially if they decide to use the feature to inform sales and the success of products. There is enormous potential for influencer campaigns to utilize this feature. Polls are the perfect way to get feedback from fans about the product they are promoting and their likelihood to purchase
Additionally, this new sticker adds to the creative competition between Snapchat and Instagram. It is important to note though that Snapchat has embraced its AR capabilities and seems to be investing and focusing their sights on that market—one that Instagram has not fully leveraged. The polls feature focuses on engagement, which tells users a lot about the goals of the platform. Instagram receives a lot of praise for the insights they offer to business pages and the ease of running ads and influencer campaigns on the app. The addition of this engagement-focused tool reflects their efforts to zero in on what their audience wants. It’s as if they polled their audience…talk about Instagram Inception.
Maybe we are coming to a stalemate in their feud as it seems both platforms are focusing on what they do best. Poll: Will Instagram and Snapchat ever friend each other?