Boost engagement and sharing with an online poll

Polls are a proven way to engage your audience. Asking people about their opinion is simple and powerful – it turns passive (and fickle) readers into engaged users who stay onsite longer (and share more often). The best news? Creating your own poll online is easy with Riddle’s quiz maker. Our publishing partners like Callaway and massive soccer site 90min quickly make polls in under five minutes.

Online polls – why does it work?

It’s basic psychology – being asked your opinion is flattering. That site you’re casually browsing? “Wow – they really want to hear what I think!” And hey – that’s just half the story.

Simply clicking and giving direct feedback to a website changes the audience relationship. Instead of passively reading/browsing information, giving their opinion with a click means the user is now part of the conversation – and is emotionally connected to the outcomes.

This has three major benefits – your active audience will:

  • Stay longer – up to 34% on average.
  • Share more often – voters are 21% more likely to want their friends (and friends of friends) involved.
  • Come back – after all, they’ll want to see how everyone else voted!

Best practices for creating Riddle polls

Don’t “overask”

Use the ‘Goldilocks’ amount of polls in your content. Too few? You’ll be missing a chance to engage your audience. Too many? People get burned out – and your interaction rates will fall.

Don’t give too many options

Also, you should have no more than four poll choices. Psychology professor Barry Schwartz pointed out in his book The Paradox of Choice that people like choices – but not too many. Present your audience with too many options – you’ll actually stress them out and many won’t make a choice at all.
Our suggestion goes even further – the best online polls have no more than two to four choices.

Delay showing the final online poll results

We’re simple creatures – once people vote, we immediately want to see the overall poll results. However, you can use this to your advantage.

We recommend you hold off showing the final results. Say you’ll announce them in three days, for example.
Why? People won’t share a poll that’s not close. If option A has 90% of the votes, why would I get my friends involved to vote for a lost cause in option B?
But if the total is uncertain, you’ll see viral sharing happen much more often.

The other bonus? You get another piece of content to share with your audience on your site and social channels:

  1. Post: The original story and poll
  2. Post: Reminders/encouragement to vote
  3. Post: The follow up – sharing the results and any analysis (“Wow – with 76% of the vote, our community picked “The Joshua Tree” as U2’s best album!”*)

Engage your customers with a Riddle poll – a summary

Any questions about Riddle’s online quiz creator – please just let us know at hello@riddle.com.
We’re customer service ninjas – we pride ourselves on reading and responding so quickly your head will spin!

There you have it – our quick tips for making your poll online a success! Start your success story now.

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