I ran across this article recently. It’s from January and talks about how Facebook is Beta testing an application to allow advertisers to poll users on the site:
Advertisers clamoring for deeper engagement with Facebook's 150 million members will soon have the ability simply to ask them what they are thinking, and then display the results for all to see -- or even better, comment on.
The social network this week will begin beta testing ads that allow marketers to poll Facebook members. The new units are the latest example of Facebook Engagement Ads, a program launched in August to more closely integrate advertisers into the fabric of the site.
This confused me because Facebook already had this service over 2 years ago! At that time, anyone could set up a poll to query a selected user base. The cost was minimal (something like $25) but it worked pretty well.
Back then I was working for an IT support company catering to higher ed. A Facebook poll was a quick and easy way to query the student population at a certain college about how effective our services on campus were.
I thought students might find it intrusive and not want to participate. It was just the opposite – I often got all the responses I needed well before the close of the poll.
Afterwards you could segment your results by gender, age, etc. It wasn’t Google Analytics quality insight but it was interesting nevertheless.
I poked around on Facebook site trying to find info on the polling feature as it was 2 years ago, or the new version as mentioned in the article, but couldn’t find anything. Hopefully, they will be rolling this feature out to the masses soon.
Obviously, if you are looking for a scientific results running a Facebook poll isn’t going to cut it. However, if you are interested in getting broad insights into what people are thinking it might be the way to go.
Nate Klaiber Says:
Jun 24, 2009 at 8:02 AM I think the platform 2 years ago was much different than it is now. The now open platform allows for much more targeted and niche polls. Distinct groups, pages, etc, now allow for you to be much more targeted with your polls to the people who have chosen to listen to what you have to say. The inverse of this is obviously pushing poll after poll on someone who doesn't necessarily want to be involved. I think the other advantage to the timing of this now is that people can choose to not be annoyed, and that can also be calculated into the results, giving you more precise results from your poll.
Now, if they would tie that into Analytics to be able to quickly see conversion rates and funnel abandonments, that would be sweet :)