Instagram Poll Stickers: What Marketers Should Be Thinking About

Instagram just released the ability to conduct polls inside stories! 

Here is how to use Instagram Polls:

1. Take an Instagram Story Photo or Video

2. Add an Instagram Poll to Your Story by Selecting an Instagram Sticker

3. Choose Your Instagram Poll Answers

4. Post Your Instagram Story Poll to Your Followers And Collect Responses

I wanted to jump in and give you my quick perspective.

As we continue to watch Instagram and Facebook innovate, innovate, innovate, it’s important to reflect on why companies succeed. Twitter lost its strength as the number two social platform from 2011 to 2015 by not innovating.

The product is basically the same four years later.

What you’re seeing from Instagram was not only did they copy the core features of Snapchat to gain market penetration and slow down Snap’s growth, but now they are continuing to add new features. 

In a release by Instagram this afternoon, they have added the capability to “ask a question and see results from your friends and followers as they vote.”

It’s all centered around user polls.

Whether you’re trying to understand which product to buy, which book to read or which restaurant to consider, Instagram now lets you ask your community in a simple poll within your story.
Things to Know:

• You can customize the yes/no field to any A/B question.
• When positioning your sticker, blue lines will appear to help you center it or avoid placing it anywhere that might be obscured when someone watches your story.

• There is a character limit (27 characters per possible response field)

• You can only have one poll per story.
• You can see full analytics on how many people responded and who responded with what answer.
• You can not change your response after voting! 

The possibilities are basically endless.

The feature starts with a simple yes/no function which you can customize into any A/B poll.

Today’s update is super interesting to me because it’s now starting to make the “stories” function more interactive, more about data collection, and a lot more valuable to individuals and companies alike.

The swipe up feature was incredibly important for direct response e-commerce and quant based marketers and now you’re seeing the polling function be incredibly important for anyone who is trying to get insights into where the mindset of the end consumer actually is.

The UI and the UX of how it’s integrated dynamically into the stories function is very frictionless, and very easy to use which is just another example of Instagram building on top of its momentum.

Last week Instagram announced they hit 800M monthly active users. All of this growth is accelerated by constant innovation and updates like this.

And for all of us marketing people, an incredibly interesting lightweight way to get some insight into consumer opinion is key.  

So I’m definitely going to conduct surveys about red or white wine or Snapchat vs. Instagram or about the Jets 😉

I’m super excited.

The last thing to remember is this is just the beginning. You’ll obviously see more ideating on top of this release.

I’m sure multiple choice responses are on the way, and I’m looking forward to what’s next.  

We are clearly seeing Instagram activate with a first mover advantage, continuing to add features and integrate functionality in a brand environment that is frictionless on a mobile device. This is big.

Start using polls now!

Listen to my POV here. 

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