Live Poll

Running a live poll is one of the best ways of engaging your audience and gathering information.

Whatever scenario you use a live poll in, they're fun, interactive, and offer a helpful way of generating and displaying data. Although a live poll may be a simple tool, there are many different ways you can use one to capture responses, engage your audience, and discover information.

This guide will cover everything you need to know about running a live poll. This includes how to create one, when to use one, and why they're so beneficial.

How Does A Live Poll Work?

A live poll is a tool that lets you ask questions and gather answers in real time. Live polls are similar to surveys and questionnaires, but the responses are updated as they get collected. This is a great way to make use of data visualization.

There are many situations you can use live polls for. There are also many different ways to use them!

They are commonly seen on social media, where users can ask their audience questions. You could use live polls during events to generate audience engagement or at the end of meetings to gain feedback.

You could use them in a learning environment to test your audience or you could apply them to your website to gather responses.

A live poll takes a multiple-choice question format that participants can choose from. As responses are gathered, the results of the poll are displayed. This is generally only shown after the user has submitted their answer.

Using a live poll is helpful for quickly being able to see what your audience thinks and feels. You can see how well they understand a certain topic, or what their opinion is on a matter.

How To Do A Live Poll

Running a live poll is easy. All you need is a question, some multiple-choice answers, and the right live poll software. Of course, you’ll also need an audience.

First, you need to establish where you’re running the live poll. This could be via social media, on your website, or anywhere else. If you use a dedicated live poll tool like Slideasy, it's easy to create a live poll in presentations, or wherever you need to run one with a live audience.

Ask a question. This could be as simple or as complex as you like. The important thing is that the question can be answered through multiple-choice answers, which you need to provide.

Live polls are usually used to gather opinions. For example, a question could be “what is your favorite ice cream flavor?” The answer options can be chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry. There’s no right or wrong here!

Of course, you could also use a poll with correct and incorrect answers to gauge your audience’s understanding of a topic.

Present the question and answers to your audience and let them answer on their devices. All they need to do is select their answer option.

When the audience responds, you get instant feedback on their answers. This is updated in real-time. As soon as your audience responds to the question, their results will be updated on the screen. Now you can see which answer is most popular and by how much. This will help you understand your audience more.

This is the basic way of running a live poll, although live polls can take various formats. If you use a tool like Slideasy, you can ask questions and generate responses in the following ways:

• Multiple choice live poll: This is the classic type of live poll where you set a question and answers, as discussed above.

• Word cloud: This is an interesting variation of a live poll. Here you ask a question and audience members submit single-word answers. This is displayed in a dynamic ‘cloud’, where the size of the word relates to its popularity. The more people submit a certain word, the larger it will be.

The important thing about a live poll is the ‘live’ aspect of it. You need to run these polls when you have an active audience (like in a presentation), and ensure they have a relatively short time limit. Otherwise, the poll could go on forever! Why Use A Live Poll? A live poll may seem like a relatively simple tool, but there are many clear benefits to using one. You could run a live poll to:

• Gain valuable marketing insights.
• Improve community engagement.
• Make events or meetings more interactive.
• Generate feedback.
• Gain insights for product development.

And plenty more!

Let's break down some of the main benefits of using a live poll.

An Easy Way To Generate Feedback

First and foremost, live polls are a fun and easy way to generate feedback from your audience. They are incredibly simple to set up and can help you gather detailed, insightful feedback from a live audience.

This data is displayed in a way that's easy to understand, while still offering total accuracy. This is a lot more efficient than asking your audience to raise their hands to answer a question.

A live poll is also a more engaging way to gather feedback than filling out a form. This is because the audience can see the updated answers in real-time, and understand how their answers contribute to the live poll results.

You can instantly conclude on a topic from a live poll. These polls ensure the process of gathering feedback is as interactive as possible!

Your Audience Will Appreciate Them

Live polls provide a completely interactive and engaging experience. Audience members don't have to submit lengthy answers or think too hard about how to set up an answer. Instead, they simply tap the answer of their choice and watch the results update.

This makes live polls a fun and interactive way to gather insights during an event or presentation. Your audience will love getting involved, and a live poll offers a convenient way to do this.

Setting up a poll helps your audience feel like their voice matters. They will also be able to see the results and compare their answers to those around them. This is always interesting.

Easily Customizable

Live polls are easy to customize based on your needs, your audience, and your question. This means you can offer the best possible experience for your audience while gathering the right kind of data efficiently.

Think about what you’re going to do with the results, how you’re going to use the data, and how you plan on displaying the live poll. Then you can build a poll around this information.

You don't need to know any coding or possess any technical skills to create a live poll. Simply choose your format, type your question, and gather responses.

Ideal For A Wide Range Of Scenarios

There are loads of different situations that lend themselves to a live poll. You can set up a live poll and use it to gather feedback in all kinds of environments. This includes in-person meetings and events, as well as remote settings.

Whether it's for a classroom, a work presentation, or a webinar, live polls can boost engagement. This makes live polls a versatile tool for helping you gather data in all kinds of situations.

Use Cases For A Live Poll

As we’ve already mentioned, there are plenty of ways and scenarios where using a live poll makes sense. Here are some of the most popular use cases for a live poll.

Gather An Audience Opinion

One of the most popular use cases for a live poll is when you want to gather the opinion of your audience. This could be for valuable market research, such as when you’re trying to determine whether a new product you're offering matches your audience’s interests. You can also use them for making sure your content aligns with your audience.

You could send out a live poll via email, add one to your website, run it on social media, or generate audience feedback during a live event. Wherever the case, live polls can help you understand opinions - information that can be used in many different ways.

Interactive Promotions

Live polls are an excellent tool for promoting an event, a giveaway, a piece of content, or more. You can use them to get your audience involved and excited about whatever you’re promoting.

To do this, ask a question that relates to the thing you’re promoting to get your audience thinking about it and engaging with the topic. This is a great way to build excitement and spread awareness.

Enhancing Presentations

A live poll can make any live presentation a lot more exciting. This is because polls actively engage the audience while providing unique data at the same time.

Whether you’re doing a work presentation, a live webinar, hosting an event, or more, you can get your audience involved through a poll. This will help you discover relevant information that you can talk about in the presentation while making sure your audience is fully engaged with what you’re speaking about.

Classroom Questions

Teachers and lecturers can quickly gauge their class’s understanding of a topic by using a live poll. Instead of running a pop quiz, simply ask your class a series of multiple-choice questions in a live poll. This can help you gauge their understanding of a topic and compare the correct and incorrect answers.

Students will enjoy this as it's a fun and informal way of gathering information. At the same time, running a live poll in a classroom environment can help you access meaningful data for improving and guiding future lessons.

Embedding Live Polls

It’s possible to embed a live poll on your blog or website. This can be a great way to make your site more interactive and to engage your visitors.

If you run a live poll like this, it needs to be ongoing, with the results constantly changing. Simply ask a question that relates to the topic of your web page or blog post, and use it to gather helpful information and enhance the user experience.

Gather Feedback

A live poll is an excellent way to gather feedback from your audience on a certain topic. You could ask them what they think about a certain product, movie, book, piece of content, or anything else. This feedback could be used to enhance future products, provide ideas for content, and more.

For example, you might publish a blog post or video. Run a live poll asking your audience what topic they would like you to cover next, or what information in the video or blog post they would like to learn more about. This can help you find future content ideas.

You could also use a live poll to gather data that you can use in your content. This is an easy way to do original research that you can display to your audience.

Voting

Live polls are a fantastic tool for counting votes.

This could be as simple as deciding on an office lunch or voting for someone for a leadership position. Whatever the context, present the live poll to your audience as a voting tool and gather the results in real time.

Social Media

Live polls are a popular way of engaging an audience on social media. You can add polls to your stories to get your audience involved and gather feedback.

Live polls are unique, and your followers will love participating in them. They're also fun and easy to join, so it's a convenient way of gathering information while increasing social media engagement.

Final Thoughts

There are many advantages and unique use cases for running a live poll.

Whatever question you want to ask, a live poll is one of the best ways to quickly get the answers you need. These polls are interactive, easy, and can help you to gather and display data in a very efficient way.

Try out Slideasy if you want to enhance your presentation with a live poll. It can be a total game changer for both your organization and your audience!