How To Use Polls for Increasing User Engagement

One of the best ways to increase audience engagement is by asking your audience questions. Who doesn’t like to be asked their opinion on something? Being opinionated is being human. By asking a reader for their opinion, you are giving them the impression that their opinion is important to you.

You are saying that you care about the customer experience, and you care about the customer. In terms of customer loyalty, this is how successful brands are built.

Increasing audience engagement is a holy grail of content on the web. But it can be really straightforward if you take the right approach.

Polls are emerging as a firm favourite as a tool for engagement. Humans are social beings. We love to share our opinions and we respond to being asked for them.

Asking your audience for their opinion signals that you actually care what they have to say.

Voting on a poll is a similar amount of effort to “liking” on social networks. One click engagement works.

Certainly it’s much quicker and easier than writing a comment. Because of spam and other issues a lot of blogs have turned off their comments but polling is a safer way to engage your audience.

Mainstream media outlets have long had the “vox pop” model, the “voice of the people”. Opinions from our fellow person on the street hold a lot of sway with people.

Sound good? Here’s how to use polls for super engagement on your blog.

How polls give you super engagement on your blog

From your point of view running the website, polls are easy to implement and quick to come up with. Pull out an issue or two from your blog post and ask your audience’s opinion.

It’s such a flexible model. You can use it to gain insights into your audience, run short surveys and get ideas for more blog posts.

You could poll your readers and then create a new list post based on their responses. Then another poll to see if they agree with the findings. The possibilities are endless.

Run a quick poll in an article asking people if they are interested in hearing more or if they are excited about a new development in your industry. What are they looking forward to, what do they care about. It’s valuable information for you and a simple way to get feedback.

We see this feedback in the simple “did this article answer your question?” poll you get on a lot of support sites, including Google and Amazon. If they are doing it, you can guarantee they are seeing results. The answers can be used to optimise their responses.

The best polling plugins for WordPress

So where do you find the best polling plugins for WordPress? We’ve got some great recommendations for you here.

Easy Polling is the easiest polling plugin for WordPress. Make unlimited polls in your WordPress dashboard and add them to your posts with a shortcode. Choose between a box or a bar layout and colour code the poll options. An animation shows the results after the user votes.

You can use Easy Polling polls to ask your visitors all sorts of questions about their preferences, if they liked the post, what they want to see from your blog, any multiple choice questions. You also get really useful poll statistics to look at. It’s so flexible and the options are endless.

You can supercharge Easy Polling by using the Social Polling addon. This extension gives you all the power of Facebook Questions right on your blog post. Readers use their Facebook IDs and you get great social proof of all the people taking your polls. It’s a simple way to use the Facebook API and includes social sharing icons – polls can get loads of shares as people pass it along to their friends. There’s also a version for BuddyPress site members.

For more than multiple choice, Opinion8 also offers a text answer to polls, so you can get much more detailed answers. It also has a powerful backend for you to start polls, customise them, reset the poll, show the results and bulk delete. You can redirect voters to a custom URL – fantastic for engagement with landing pages or sales pages.

Or how about an either/or poll? Battle Vote pitches two options against each other and lets social shares decide the winner. Your audience will take sides and share on social media, driving more traffic to your site and maybe even going viral. Set images, colours and other options and watch the votes roll in.

The Dilemma Plugin uses large images for an eye catching poll and is a simple but fun A/B option. Survey your site visitors and find out their preferences.

Some of the top polling plugins for WordPress there, so you can make great polls and enjoy super engagement on your blog. Who knows, you might even go viral.

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