Interactive Polls

Engaging social media features known as interactive polls let fans and followers cast votes and share their opinions in real time on a given question or topic. They do this by choosing from a set of visually tempting and straightforward options presented in either a multiple-choice, sliding scale, or emoji format. A post with this type of poll, except it is not limited to Instagram, Twitter (now X), or Facebook.

These polls are not the type of archaic opinion surveys you may have filled out in the past, where the only amusement came from making fun of the nonsensical questions or contemplating what kind of shape the survey was up to. Polls can be serious business, even if they are currently the cheerful emojis of strategic audience engagement. In this chapter, I want to discuss the recent rise of the interactive poll and its potential as a tool for not only audience engagement but also informal audience research.

Interactive polls offer creators a chance to gain insights into who interacts with their content. At the same time, they are somewhat of a form of 21st-century mind-reading because they provide straight-to-the-point, instant insight into audience behavior, preferences, and opinions.