LinkedIn Polls: Strategies & Tactics For the Most Engagement [2024]

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Stuck in the same rotation of stale LinkedIn posts and low engagement patterns? You’re not alone, and there are ways to break out of this rut. To make the most of your efforts on LinkedIn, consider leveraging the power of LinkedIn Polls.

LinkedIn Polls open the door to quick and easy interactions with your followers, real-time feedback for your brand, and increased visibility for your content.

Learn how to incorporate polls into your LinkedIn marketing strategy to generate optimal engagement among your audience. In this post, we’ll review how to create LinkedIn Polls, best practices for maximizing your efforts, and answers to key questions about this engagement-boosting social media tactic.

What Are LinkedIn Polls?

A LinkedIn Poll is a type of interactive post on LinkedIn that gathers audience responses and generates a graph of those responses in real time. LinkedIn Polls mean you can ask your audience a multiple choice question with up to four possible responses.

You can post a poll on your general profile, or share a poll in a LinkedIn group. Where you post will determine who can see the poll and its results. Once an audience member responds to your poll, they’ll be able to see what everyone else has answered.

Benefits of Running LinkedIn Polls

Providing a fast and easy way for your audience to engage with your post is always an automatic win. LinkedIn Polls for business also carry plenty of additional benefits.

Source of Analytics

One of the most obvious benefits of using LinkedIn Polls is that they allow you to take the pulse of your key audience and tap into their opinions in real time. Instead of running tests and trying to discover how your followers or group members feel about something in a roundabout way, why not simply ask?

Getting fast and accurate feedback from your audience, whether it’s about their feelings on the latest trends or the type of content you share, can go a long way in honing your social media marketing strategy to perfection.

Audience Engagement Opportunities

Asking open-ended questions that provoke deep thinking and long-form answers can be helpful in some cases, but the fact is, people move quickly on social media. It’s all too easy to scroll right past a question or a call for opinions when it requires more than a few seconds to craft an answer.

Polls invite easy audience engagement and instant feedback. This quick engagement opportunity is a win-win!

To double up on inviting audience engagement, include a response option along the lines of, “Other (please comment).” This way, you still invite more in-depth feedback in the comments and perhaps a healthy back-and-forth between your audience.

At the same time, you invite easy feedback and engagement through the multiple choice options.

Virality Potential

Because it’s easy and rewarding to respond to a poll, LinkedIn Polls have a high potential for going viral. The more interest and engagement your poll collects, the more people will see it.

You can increase visibility and virality potential by adding appropriate LinkedIn hashtags and tagging people in your network who might also be interested in the results or eager to share their opinions.

Tagging experts or highly visible professionals in an area applicable to your poll question can get your content in front of countless additional people. You can even send the poll URL out to your email newsletter subscribers or other social media followers.

Drives Brand Awareness & Trust

Posting LinkedIn Polls tells your followers something important: that you’re listening and truly interested in their thoughts and feelings. This gesture helps build brand awareness and create trust, regardless of how you end up using your findings.

Sharing content that requests feedback and invites conversations can help strengthen your brand compared to stagnant posts that only focus on your skills or your products.

How to Make & Schedule LinkedIn Polls

Creating polls on LinkedIn is just as easy as creating regular posts. Follow these easy steps:

1. Begin by clicking “Start a Post.”

Then, in the bottom row of post types, choose the bar graph icon that says “Create a Poll” when you hover over it.

2. Fill in your question and answer options.

Use simple language and a clear question. Incorporating technical terms or complex ideas may make your audience less likely to engage with your poll. Since there are character limits, be mindful of the length of each answer option so that your content doesn’t unintentionally get cut off.

Choose between 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, and 2 weeks for your poll to stay live. Then, click “Done.” Your poll will be pulled into a draft LinkedIn post, where you can add context around your question and incorporate a strong call to action.

Once you have finished filling in your content, click on the clock icon to schedule your LinkedIn poll for a later time or click “Post” to share immediately.

Best Practices for LinkedIn Polls

Simply posting a quick poll and hoping for the best will generally not yield the marketing results you’re hoping for. Implement these best practices for LinkedIn Polls to build brand loyalty and facilitate meaningful conversations with your audience.

Your social presence shouldn’t depend on the amount of free time you happen to have in a given day or week. To show up consistently and become a reliable source of information and thought-provoking content for your audience, schedule your social media content in advance.

While LinkedIn does allow for native scheduling of polls, this capability has its limitations. You can only schedule up to 30 days in advance and once you’ve scheduled a post, you can only edit its content. You cannot reschedule it to a different time. In this case, you must delete the post and create a new one with the same content.

For a smoother experience and increased capabilities, like an AI writer and a streamlined content calendar, use Simplified to create and schedule your LinkedIn Polls.

While most third-party social media schedulers don’t allow for scheduling LinkedIn polls, Simplified’s LinkedIn Post Scheduler is complete with useful capabilities for all your scheduling needs.

Add your drafted LinkedIn poll into Simplified’s calendar planner or use the AI writing assistant to help craft a relevant poll for you. Then, schedule it for later publication or save it as a draft for external client approval.

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Keep Your Polls Short

One of the key benefits of using LinkedIn Polls is that they can collect plenty of engagement without requiring a lot of time or thought from your audience. If the poll or its accompanying post becomes too lengthy, this benefit flies out the window.

Keep your polls concise, with just enough context to show your followers why your question matters and get them in the headspace to respond accurately.

Proofread Before Posting

While you can always edit scheduled posts using the Simplified social media scheduler, there is no way to edit posts after they’re live.

Give yourself time to perform several edits and proofreading cycles for each poll before posting. The last thing you want is for a typo to confuse your audience or force you to delete it later.

Speak to Your Audience’s Problems

Your audience is on LinkedIn to network, learn, and seek out solutions to their business problems. In order to optimize engagement from your audience, it’s essential to get right to the heart of their most pressing pain points and questions.

By crafting polls that give them a space to collaborate, brainstorm, or even vent about a key issue that others may share, you can create engagement and increase the virality potential of your post.

Ask For Feedback

Double up on the impact of your LinkedIn Polls by using them to request feedback about your products, services, or content. Polls that invite feedback also build engagement and conversation, and they can shed light on important pivot points you might consider taking in your business.

Opening these avenues for feedback can help you grow as a professional and strengthen the trust of your audience as they can feel that you’re truly interested in their input.

Engage with Responders

Just like any LinkedIn article or post, the best way to get optimal engagement out of a LinkedIn Poll is to engage with people who respond, especially those who take the time to leave a comment. Carve out time in the days after your poll goes live to respond to as many comments as possible and engage with the users who interacted with your content.

Once the poll has wrapped up, share the results with your audience, adding your key takeaways and professional analysis of the findings. This process adds value for you and your business, and for your followers as they can learn from your results.

More About LinkedIn Polls

Dig into a few frequently asked questions to solidify your understanding of LinkedIn Polls and get started!

Do polls do well on LinkedIn?

Polls have the potential to perform extremely well on LinkedIn. Because the poll format offers an easy way for people to express their opinions and share their thoughts very quickly, this type of post can garner even more engagement than LinkedIn carousel posts and other stagnant content types.

At the same time, it’s important to keep best practices in mind in order to see the best possible results. Not every poll is guaranteed to perform well.

Are LinkedIn polls anonymous?

When someone votes on a LinkedIn Poll, the author of the poll can see how the person voted. While a voter’s name will not be publicly displayed automatically on the poll, authors can always choose to share data.

Usually, it’s best to only share the aggregate results of the poll, which would keep responses mostly private and only visible to you as the author.

What are good poll ideas on LinkedIn?

The right poll ideas for your brand will depend on your overall goals, your product, and your social media target audience. Once you have an idea of these basics and a direction you’d like to take, you can use an online poll generator to craft a strong poll that will rake in the engagement.

If you’re still struggling with topic ideas and wording, why not let AI content creation tools give your brainstorming a boost? The Simplified AI Writer can come up with relevant and beautifully worded polls when you prompt it with information about your audience.

Better yet, you can ask Simplified AI for help directly from the Content Calendar! Load the poll directly into your content calendar, edit as desired, and then post or schedule according to your content strategy.

What are LinkedIn Polls ads?

Ads through LinkedIn Polls haven’t rolled out yet. Right now, only single-image, video, event, and document posts can be shared as ads on LinkedIn. LinkedIn ads allow users to select their ideal audience and boost the content with paid promotions.

What is the LinkedIn Polls character limit?

When crafting your LinkedIn Poll, be sure that your questions and answer options adhere to the character limits so that your audience can view all of your content. Poll questions can be up to 140 characters, but answer options are limited to only 30 characters.

Remember, you can share additional content around your poll by writing in the general content box of your post. LinkedIn posts can be up to 3,000 characters long, but short and sweet often works best.

Start Scheduling Your LinkedIn Polls

LinkedIn Polls are the perfect tool for changing up your content, taking the pulse of your audience, and stacking up the engagement metrics necessary for pushing your content out to an even wider following.

To make the most of this post type, set aside time each week or month to craft a couple of high-interest polls that get straight to the heart of your audience’s pain points. Then, schedule them with ease using the Simplified Social Media Scheduler!

Simplified LinkedIn scheduler makes it easy to map out your LinkedIn marketing strategy, schedule your posts at suitable times, and watch your LinkedIn engagement rise.

Craft content, schedule your posts, and manage your inboxes all in one tab with Simplified.