This guest post is from Josh Peters who blogs at Shuaism. All views in the post are the author’s alone. If you’re interested in guest posting, please email me your guest post idea, and let’s take it from there. Thanks!
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I can’t, and unless you’re Jean Grey you probably can’t either. Why? Because we are all different. The culmination of our personal experiences, the nuances and challenges that have changed the way we think and act are going to create our responses for us. That’s why you need something where people can give you their feedback.
Something where people can give you their answer quickly and raise your chances of getting a good response. Anyone know where we could find such a magnificent sounding utility? Well thankfully the Greeks created a wonderful thing called The Poll (I don’t know if they really did, but they invented everything else so why not).
The beauty of a poll, or survey if you prefer, is that they are easy to setup and easy to deploy. They are quick and easy to answer so you’re giving yourself a better chance of getting your question(s) answered. They can also serve as a great Guerrilla Social Media Marketing tool!
The marketing side comes in when you add your company’s name to the question or the message. When it’s originated from your account in Twitter or any of the other social networks you are a part of. Be sure to encourage your readers, members, users, and employees to forward out the survey and ask to help it spread so you can gain publicity as well as insight.
With FaceBook, once you setup a survey (using a FaceBook app) you would want to promote it to your friends and any relevant groups you’re a part of. When people take your survey it will show up in their feeds and be seen by their friends and it will grow from there. Automatically showing up in individual feeds across the network is one of the greatest feature of FaceBook when it comes to marketing.
As with all of the Guerrilla Social Media Marketing topics I’ll do it myself and in the comments I want to hear about what you’ve done. This time, however, I’ve added something extra. Below each of the survey / polling tools is a link to a survey made with that tool (same survey each time) so you can see what each one looks like. When Tweeting the survey you like best (based on format) out to other people please copy and paste the whole pre-made Tweet below each tool. I’ll post the results of the polls and which polling tool was the most popular among the readers in a week.
Survey / Polling tools
SocialToo – Quick and easy. Enter your question in the first box, and then enter your possible answers in the boxes below and you’re done. Social Too gives you the options to spread it quickly via Twitter, enable comments from readers, and even post it to your FaceBook account.
#GSMM survey: What attracts your eye most on your inbound Twitter stream? http://cli.gs/9EWzUY – Please RT
Survey Monkey - Very powerful and fully featured. The free (basic) account lets you create simple or complex surveys and then view the results. The paid upgrade allows you to make templates and other goodies.
#GSMM survey: What attracts your eye most on your inbound Twitter stream? http://cli.gs/3pbUe2 – Please RT
TwtPoll – By far the quickest and easiest. Just insert your question, add some answers and it will automatically be tweeted out if you want. There is also a place to allow comments at the bottom of the survey.
#GSMM survey: What attracts your eye most on your inbound Twitter stream? http://cli.gs/9a7ryg – Please RT
Survey Hurricane – This FaceBook App lets you make surveys and quizzes then send it out to your friends, family, and fans and lets them spread it through their network.
Now you’ve seen mine, I want to see yours. Whether you have utilized a survey recently or make one after seeing this article post the link in here. I will be sure to take it and tweet the link since you took the time to put it in the comments.
What do you think? Useful, awesome, dumb idea? Leave your comments and links below.
Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters
This is part of a 50 post project about taking traditional offline guerrilla marketing ideas / tactics and applying them to social media / online marketing. If you enjoyed this post and would like to host one of the Guerrilla Social Media Marketing series on your blog please send an email to shua[at]shuaism.com. To easily follow the series please subscribe to my feed via RSS or Email.
Josh Peters is a freelance social media consultant from Salt Lake City, Utah who, when he’s not frolicking in the fields of social media, enjoys working on his startup RoyalAnts, watching horror movies with his wife, and playing with his dogs. He blogs at Shuaism and would really like to connect with you on FaceBook, LinkedIn, and/or Twitter.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Another survey tool is AskItOnline. It uses an intuitive drag ‘n drop survey builder allowing you to create your survey with ease in minutes!
Our servers are also located outside the USA (Canada), so your data is protected and so is your respondents’ privacy!
http://www.AskItOnline.com
This is a great review of some of the apps available for doing polls, with “convenience” samples. These are useful ways to get quick information on an available group, which you can then feed into more systematic surveys of your customer base or target market.
Thank you both for the comments, I like askitonline, I”ll have to try that one out on my next poll.
If you haven’t checked out Zoomerang, I would like to suggest you visit the site. Zoomerang pioneered the online survey space and has a free version (30 question/100 respondent limit per survey), a Pro version you can subscribe to on a monthly basis and a Premium version with lots of advanced features (discounts are offered to educators and nonprofits on both the Pro and Premium versions). It is very easy to use – but if you have questions, Zoomerang offers free telephone support and a wide range of online webinars and tutorials. Since Zoomerang is part of MarketTools, one of the largest market research companies in the world, Zoomerang has access to a wide range of survey expertise which enables them to build a product that reflects real world needs. Zoomerang offers a wide range of templates enabling you to quickly design a great survey – powerful list management tools, the ability to send surveys via email, mobile phones, or web sites – and a range of useful reporting and analysis tools including export to Powerpoint and open ended text analysis. You can find additional features at the website as well as online survey tips and suggestions at the Zoomerang blog.
http://www.zoomerang.com/Powerful-Features/
I was looking back at this article and while I thought I had followed it up, I can see that the comment is missing so I’d like to make that up and let anyone reading know that the winner was TwtPoll. It had 3x the responses as the rest.