Struggling for a blog topic? Wanting to see if others feel the same way as you do? Curious if companies are outsourcing their social media or creating internal departments? LinkedIn has answered these questions in their recent enhancements to their polls. Polls of this nature are not very scientific but when you are seeking a representative sample, it is a useful tool.
LinkedIn Poll Enhancements
LinkedIn has completely redesigned how we create polls making them as simple as possible. Starting with the location of the polls, which are found in the drop down of the More button in your profile. The polls page lists polls that people are seeking participation in addition to where users can create a new poll. The create a new poll is located in the left column. LinkedIn has also created a per poll embed so that you can share the poll on your blog. Very smart.
How to Create a LinkedIn Poll.
1. Profile page. On your profile page, click More. Click polls.
2. Polls page. From the polls page, click the create a new poll and you are presented with fields to begin typing in your question. You are allotted 5 choices which those fields appear as you start typing in the choices in each row. Users can opt to have the choices appear in random order or a set order.
Note: I did find that it does not allow respondents to choose more than 1 answer.
3. Length of Poll. Determine the length of your poll by clicking on the calendar. The default is one month but can go as long as 90 days.
4. Sharing Tools & Embed. To maximize the number of respondents (some polls that I was reviewing for this article were receiving a low response) you can have the poll tweeted. In addition, as stated above, each poll has its own URL and embed so you can incorporate the poll onto your blog. The URL and embed is created naturally after you create the poll.
5. Poll Analytics. The poll results are visible to all viewers of the poll. This could sway the results as users can view the results prior to voting. The results are created numerically as well as in visual symbols and graph and include the the number of respondents, demographics for age, seniority and gender.
photo credit: LinkedIn Blog
photo credit: LinkedIn Blog
Once the poll is posted it cannot be edited. You would have to click “end” under the poll when you click on the list of polls or via “polls you created” tab. This will end the poll and you will have to create a new one.
To test the functionality, ease of use and also to see of this will garner the responses/sample size to expand further upon the topic, I have created a LinkedIn Poll to see if this is a viable option. I will be sure to keep you posted as to this experiment.