At one point or the other, you must have participated in an online poll. Perhaps, it popped up on a friend’s Instagram story or you came across it on your Twitter feed.

Whatever the case, these occurrences show that online polls are a common method for audience engagement and gathering feedback. 

The nature of social media platforms makes them a viable medium for data collection. Little wonder many of them now support in-built polling features and integrate with external poll makers like Formplus. 

Wondering how you can take advantage of this to create engaging polls on your social media account? In this article, we will show you how to create polls on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more. 

Use for Free: Simple Online Poll Maker

Uses of Online Polls 

• Opinion-Sampling

Online polls are one of the most effective methods of real-time opinion sampling. Whether you’re dealing with a large audience or a fraction of one, you can use polls to gather diverse thoughts on a subject matter. 

• On-time Interaction and Engagement

Companies use online polls to feel the pulse of their current clients. It’s a smart way to measure customer loyalty and overall engagement with your brand. 

• Establish thought leadership

Every industry deals with trending topics on a daily basis. You can establish your brand as a leader by conducting a poll about these leading industry topics.

• Promote Products or Services

Ultimately, the main objective of brands engaging in social media is to promote their products or services, and increase market share. Running polls regularly can help you become top-of-mind in your audience whenever they need your product or service. 

How to Create a Poll on Facebook 

Facebook polls are a great way to know what people think about your brand or sample their opinions on specific subject matters. You can create and share polls on Facebook Groups, via your stories, or on messenger. Let’s show you how to go about it. 

Read: Online Voting: Guide to Creating Online Poll in 7 Simple Steps

Creating Facebook Polls in Groups

Step 1: Log into your Facebook account. Select “groups” from the menu and choose the group for your poll.

Step 2: Click on “what’s on your mind” to start creating a new post. When the “post” section pops up, click on the three dots at the bottom of the pop-up to see more options. 

Step 3: Select “poll” to add this option to your post. 

Step 4: Fill in the required information for the different fields. After this, click on “poll options” and input the ground rules for your Facebook poll. For example, you restrict the poll to one answer per person. 

Step 5: Click “post” and your poll goes live immediately. 

Creating Facebook Polls on your Stories

Step 1: Log into your Facebook account and click on “create a new story”.

Step 2: Swipe through different options until you see the “poll” card. Now, input your question and options. 

Step 3: If you want, you can customize the background of the poll. When you’re done, click on the “share” button and the poll will go live. 

On Offer: Free Political Poll Template

Creating Facebook Messenger Polls

Step 1: Log into your Messenger app and create a new group chat.

Step 2: At the bottom of the page, you find the “+” option just beside the text box. Click this to access other options. 

Step 3: Select the Facebook Poll icon and fill in the required details including questions and options. 

Step 4: Click “create a poll” and share with your group. 

Advantages of Facebook Polls 

1. Facebook polls are one of the most effective methods of customer engagement. 
2. They help you gather feedback from your audience in real-time 

Disadvantages of Facebook Polls

1. Limited opinion sampling due to poor poll distribution. 
2. Facebook has limited configurations for polls and surveys. 

On Offer: Free Straw Poll Template

How to Create a Poll on Twitter

Twitter polls help you to gather spontaneous feedback from your audience. The good thing is it’s pretty easy to create a poll on Twitter right on your timeline—here’s how to pull this off on the mobile app or web application. 

Step 1: Log into your Twitter account. 

Step 2: Click on the “compose new tweet” icon and then, select the “add poll” icon. 

Step 3: Then, type your poll question in the main box and fill in the answer options. You can add up to four different options for a single poll. 

Step 4: Indicate the duration of the poll; that is, how long it would appear on people’s feeds. 

Step 5: Tap Tweet to post the poll.

Read: How Do Strawpolls Work? [ +Free Straw Poll Template]

Advantages of Twitter Polls 

1. Running Twitter polls regularly can increase your account engagements substantially. This translates to a higher follower count and greater influence on the app. 
2. Twitter polls help you gather great insights and tips from your followers

Disadvantages of Twitter Polls 

1. It’s easy for your poll to get lost in the sauce due to the number of engagements on the platform. 
2. You cannot save Twitter poll results. 

How to Create a Poll on Instagram

Instagram allows you to create and share polls on your stories. As people cast their votes, they’d see data showing how others have voted in the past. Here’s a simple guide on creating Instagram polls. 

Step 1: Log into your Instagram app.

Step 2: Click on “create new story”. You can add a picture background to make the poll more interactive.

Step 3: Select the “sticker icon” from the app and choose the Poll sticker. Now, add your question and edit the yes/no options to suit your preferences. 

Step 4:  Select “Done” to finish editing and share the post. 

Advantages of Instagram Polls 

1. Instagram polls are one the most effective social listening tools, especially for B2C and D2C businesses.
2. It helps you to catch your followers’ attention. 

Disadvantages of Instagram Polls

1. It’s easy to miss them, especially if you have a large number of followers. 
2. These polls have limited reach. 

How to Create a Poll on LinkedIn

Since LinkedIn launched its online polling feature, many users have taken to it as the go-to method of opinion sampling. Even better, LinkedIn polls have a massive reach and help you interact with a large number of professionals. Here’s how to create and publish LinkedIn polls. 

Step 1: Click “Start a post”.

Step 2: Click “Create a poll”.

Step 3: In the “Create a Poll” window, type your question and fill in the options.

Step 4: Select the Poll duration from the dropdown. Click Next.

Step 5: Click the Edit icon to edit the post. You can add more to the post in the “What do you want to talk about?” tab.

Step 6: Click “Post”. Your poll is now live! 

Advantages of LinkedIn Polls

1. LinkedIn polls have a wider reach compared to organic reach on in-feed posts. 
2. They last for a longer period of time, allowing you to gather more feedback from a larger number of participants. 

Disadvantages of LinkedIn Polls

1. Because they are posted on the feed, LinkedIn polls can reduce the quality of information and interactions on organic posts. 
2. Data from LinkedIn polls can easily get lost in the sauce. 

How to Create a Poll on Telegram

Step 1: Open Telegram on your PC or smartphone.

Step 2: Open the channel or group

Step 3: Click on the ellipsis (three vertical dots) in the top right corner of your screen. This reveals a drop-down menu. 

Step 4: Click “create poll” on the menu.

Step 5: Fill the Poll question in the text box. Next, input your options. To enter more than one option, click on “Add an Option” and then type it down. 

Step 6: After cross-checking the information, click on “Create” in the top right corner. Now, your poll is live! 

Advantages of Telegram Polls 

1. It’s an effective way to gather feedback from your audience. 
2. Telegram supports several features to help you gather data seamlessly. 

Disadvantages of Telegram Polls

1. Because of its instant-messaging support, polls easily get lost in the sauce on Telegram. 
2. Limited reach compared to social media platforms. 

How to Create a Poll on Zoom

To improve audience interactions, you can create and administer Zoom polls during meetings. The polling feature for Zoom meetings allows you to create single choice or multiple choice polling questions. Here’s how to pull this off: 

Step 1: Sign in to the Zoom web portal.

Step 2: In the navigation menu, click Meetings. Click on the topic of your scheduled meeting. If you do not have a scheduled meeting, schedule a meeting now.

Step 3: Scroll to the bottom to find the Polls tab. Click + Create to begin creating the poll. Enable advanced polling and quizzes, then select “poll”. 

Step 4: Click Untitled Poll to change the name of this set of polls. Click on the question area to add your questions and options. That’s it!

Advantages of Zoom Polls 

1. Improves interaction with meeting participants. 
2. Zoom polls are a great way to sample opinions and collect responses in real-time. 

Limitations of Zoom Polls

1. Only the original meeting host can edit or add polls during a meeting.
2. You lose polling data if the meeting stops abruptly—the poll report will only display the last poll occurrence. 

How to Create a Poll in TikTok

While TikTok is primarily a video-sharing platform, you can use polls to promote interactions with your audience. Here’s how to create a poll on TikTok: 

Step 1: Log into your TikTok app. 

Step 2: Click on the “create new video” icon at the bottom of the screen.

Step 3: Add your video. Then click “next”.

Step 4: Tap on the sticker icon at the bottom of the screen then choose “poll”. 

Step 5: Fill in the question and options. 

Step 6: Select “Done” in the top right corner of the screen. Then tap “Next” at the bottom right of the screen. Now, add your caption and tags to the video.

Step 7: Click “Post” at the bottom right of the screen to publish your video and poll to TikTok. 

Advantages of TikTok Polls

1. It allows you to interact better with your audience. 
2. TikTok polls improve account engagement. 

Disadvantages of TikTok Polls

1. Limited distribution options
2. You cannot print submitted responses. 

How to Create a Poll on Whatsapp

Whatsapp doesn’t have an in-app poll feature. However, you can use add-on tools like OpinionStage and Chat2Desk to create and share polls to your Whatsapp contacts. Alternatively, you can create a poll on Formplus and share the link to respondents on Whatsapp. 

Advantages of Formplus over Social Media Platforms for Online Polling 

While social media platforms might be the popular choice for online polling, they are not the best fit for every context. For example, if you need to print submitted responses or get real-time in-depth analytics on polling data, you can’t do these on social media platforms. 

So what do you do? 

The best bet is switching to a data collection platform like Formplus. Here’s how it compares to other online polling platforms.  

• Security

Formplus guarantees data privacy and security during and after online polling. Our platform is GDPR compliant and this means you can collect private information from respondents without fear of data breaches. We’ve also implemented SSL encryption on all Formplus forms, which ensures that the connection between your web browser and our servers is secure at all times.

• Embed Images and Videos in Your Online Polls

Most social media platforms have a simple polling system—you fill in questions, a few options and that’s it! With Formplus, it’s a lot different. 

With the embed field, you can add images and videos to your polls to make them more interactive. Even better, you only need to drag and drop the embed field into the builder’s work area to add it to your poll. 

• Send Follow Up Emails 

Want more responses for your online poll? You can send out email reminders to respondents to get them to participate in the poll before the deadline hits. You can send email reminders to respondents who have only partially completed your poll or remind those you have invited to participate in the poll via email invitation.

• Responses and Storage Quota

Subscribing to a paid Formplus plan means you can collect and store unlimited responses from poll participants. Even with the free plan, you can collect up to 1,000 poll responses. 

• Real-time Reports and Analytics

In the form analytics dashboard, you can view important data like the total number of poll submissions, the total number of views, and abandonment rates. Formplus also lets you build custom visual reports in a few clicks with the robust reports summary tool. 

• More Poll distribution Options 

Formplus is an all-in-one poll distribution tool. After creating your poll, you can copy the link and share it with respondents directly, You can also share the poll via QR code or embed it to your website. 

Even better, you can use the social media direct sharing tool to publish the poll on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Using Formplus for online polling means you have more than one way to collect responses and gather more data. 

How to Create a Poll on Formplus

Step 1: Log into your Formplus account. If you don’t have a Formplus account, you can sign up for a free one here. 

Step 2: On your dashboard, click the “create new form” button. This takes you to the form builder. 

Step 3: In the form builder, you’d see the inputs section with several form fields and options. Drag and drop preferred fields from this section into the work area. You can add text fields, numerical fields, rating fields, and even fields for open-ended questions. 

Step 4: Next, click on the “pencil” icon beside each field to access the “editing” tab. Here, you can add questions and options to your poll. Save all the changes you’ve made to your form. 

Step 5: Using the numerous customization options in the form customization section, change the look and feel of your form. You can add background images, choose a new font or customize the form background. 

Step 6: Go to the form sharing section and choose your preferred form sharing options. You can copy and share the links directly, share them to your social media pages or share via email invitation. 

Conclusion

While online polls are a tested method for improving audience engagement, they are also highly distracting. If you want this method of data collection to work for you, you have to focus on specific goals and help the audience see how their responses are relevant to achieving those goals.