How To Create & Add a Poll to an Instagram Story

Polls are neat ways to engage your audience in Instagram and are used all the time by brands and individuals to ask questions, get feedback, gather ideas and interact with their fans. The process of creating a poll is easy. Coming up with an interesting and most importantly, engaging poll is the hard bit. This tutorial is going to walk you through how to create a poll in an Instagram Story.

Polls have an uncertain future on Instagram right now. After the tragic death of a teenager who committed suicide after adding an Instagram poll on whether she should do it or not, Instagram are apparently revisiting polls. Shamefully, 69% of respondents voted for her to do it.

Despite that tragedy, Instagram polls can be a force for good. Social media marketers use them to gather feedback on products and services, on proposed changes, on new ideas and the brand at large. Individuals use polls for any reason, from whether to wear the red or white dress or whether to wear a logo tee or plain tee. They can be as serious or as lighthearted as you like.

Create an Instagram poll

To create an Instagram poll, you first need to create a Story post. That post should relate to the poll you’re trying to create in some way to keep it cohesive.

Then, from within the Story window:

1. Select the sticker icon at the top and select a Poll sticker.
2. Select ‘Ask a question’ and type your question.
3. Select Yes and then No to change the answer types if necessary.
4. Select the checkmark in the top right when finished.
5. Drag the poll within the Story if you need to or leave in the center.
6. Finish your Story post and publish it.

Once published, your audience will be able to vote on your poll by selecting their answer of choice. If you have notifications enabled, you will see each vote as it comes in. Otherwise, open the Story  and select ‘Seen by X viewers’ at the bottom. This will show the analytics screen with the vote results and who voted.

Creating engaging Instagram polls

The type of poll you use depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Here are a few ideas for polls that work.

Gather feedback

Thinking of changing something about a product or service? Have you changed something already? An Instagram poll is a great way to ask your audience what they think. This is very effective, either before a change to see how it would go down or after to see how it is going down. It’s cheap, offers fast response and enables you to act quickly if the change wasn’t as successful as you would like.

Examples could be ‘Would you prefer our packaging to be fully biodegradable?’ or ‘Should we change our logo from yellow to blue?’. As long as the question works with only two answers you’re fine.

Use trending topics

Linking an Instagram poll, a trending topic and your brand or chosen subject is social media gold. If something is trending right now that links to what you’re interested in, creating a poll around it should gain quite a lot of attention. Exactly what depends on what you’re promoting or interested in but if it is linked to a hot topic right now you can capitalize on that to build your own following or brand.

Use a sliding scale poll

When you select the Poll sticker in a Story, you will also see a heart emoji and a slider near it. Select that to add a sliding interest scale pool to your story instead of a question. You can use this to gauge interest in a subject. It isn’t as quantifiable as a yes or no answer but it’s a different way to gather feedback.

For example you could ask ‘How interested would you be in a new widget that could remove stains from clothes?’ or ‘How excited are you for the new iPhone?’ If you link it to what you’re promoting, you can then segue into your offer or link to a new product you are promoting.

Cross-linking in an Instagram poll

You can use an Instagram poll to cross link to something else. For example, you could ask a question in a poll, like ‘How much do you think each Game of Thrones episode cost to make?’ and link it to a blog post you wrote about that subject providing the answer within the post. This is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website or client website while offering interest to readers too.

Instagram polls are a great way to increase engagement for marketers and are a free way of gathering feedback, reviews and product development ideas. Why wouldn’t you use them?