By Brittnay Bell, Account Executive
Polls are a great way to boost engagement and get feedback from your followers, but there are two problems with running polls solely in your Instagram stories. First, they are only viewable by people who follow you, and second, they’ll disappear in 24 hours. So, how else can we use Instagram to get customer feedback for product development while boosting your engagement and increasing the likelihood that your content will show up on the Explore Page? Try running a poll on your post. Here are three easy steps to get started.
- Determine the photo or video you want to post, showcasing the item or topic for which you’re collecting feedback. Let’s say you are a healthcare provider, and you want to know if your customers prefer to schedule over the phone or online. This will determine where you invest – in training your team or beefing up your online booking system. Your photo or video should reflect what you are asking about, so for our example, we would show a side-by-side of someone on the phone and someone on the computer.
- Next, write a catchy-but-concise caption, one that can be read quickly and gets right to the point of your question. In our example, we would recommend something like, “We want to know, how do you make your appointments? Do you prefer to call the office? Or book online?”
- For the last step, you’ll want to comment twice, right after your post is published. Each of the two comments should represent an optional response to your poll. When the comments are posted, you’ll pin them to the top of the conversation (more on how to do that here). Then, encourage people who view the post to ‘like’ the comment to show which option they’d prefer and keep a tally of the votes. In our example, we would pin these comments: 1. “Like this comment, if you 📞call your provider’s office” 2. “Like this comment, if book online 🖥️”
That’s it! It is as simple as posting anything else on Instagram, so next time you try it, let us know what you learned. Bonus tip: don’t forget to use hashtags, and engage with comments on your posts. Both of these will help to increase your likelihood of reaching more people and collecting even more responses.