How To Create a Poll on Instagram

Jamie Read more June 25, 2021

Social networks are always trying to come up with new ways to engage you and keep you from switching to the competition. Snapchat has Snap Maps, Twitter has just increased the character limit for some users and Instagram has recently introduced polls. If you want to know more about them and how to create a poll on Instagram, this tutorial is for you.

Instagram polls: What are they?

Instagram polls work inside stories to create another level of interactivity. You can add a poll sticker to an Instagram story in order to ask a question and get feedback. The sticker will show you the results of your poll in real time as your friends vote and can act as a simple way to get validation, advice or feedback as required.

They work for both the pollster and the respondents by keeping everything within the story. Rather than having to leave to direct message, you can respond to the poll within the story and never have to leave. Expect companies to take this up in a big way. Anything that increases engagement between a brand and their fans is going to be rinsed dry before we all get tired of it.

Creating a poll on Instagram

Creating a poll on Instagram is very straightforward. All you need do is take a picture, add a poll sticker, add the question and publish it.

Open the Instagram app and create your story. Take a picture of something or use an existing image if you prefer. Something that places a context to your poll to avoid confusion.
Add any filters or text and remember to leave room for the poll sticker.
Select the stickers icon from the app and select the Poll sticker.
You will see a Yes and No page with ‘Ask a question…’. Type a question in the text area.
Select the Yes and No boxes to edit the response. This will need to be tailored to the question you ask.
Select “Done” to finish editing and place the poll sticker where you want on the image.
Share the story post as you normally would.

Once live, anyone who sees the post will get a popup alert that there is a poll and will be able to respond. They can then make a selection depending on the responses you added at Step 5 above.

Notifications and Statistics

As people respond to your poll, Instagram will notify you via push notifications. This will happen every time someone votes. If you’re expecting a lot of people to respond, you may want to turn those off. You can go to your story post to see the results if that works better for you.

To access the statistics just open your story post and swipe up to access analytics. You will see a list of the people who responded and how many people voted either way. If you select the eye icon for detailed statistics you can also see who voted what way too.

Instagram polls will stay live as long as the story is live, so 24 hours. The statistics are only available during this time and will be removed when the story is removed. No long term records are kept so make sure to check the results of your poll before the story expires.

Wrapping Up

Using Instagram polls is a cool way to get feedback on all manner of things. Most are likely to be mundane or frivolous but some are also likely to be more imaginative and useful for content creators.

Have you seen any interesting Instagram polls yet? Clever wording? Interesting choices? Tell us about them below if you have!