Revealed: 8 Instagram Poll Ideas To Increase Stories’ Engagement

-Play a quick round of trivia on Instagram story polls

Asking engaging trivia questions is a simple, yet great, idea for an Instagram poll. This approach is great for brands that are looking to establish their presence outside of their product offerings.

Trivia also allows for a great amount of flexibility. You can choose to ask questions related to the category you’re in, specific questions about your products, current events, etc. General trivia questions could also work.

You have free range for how detailed you want these trivia questions to be.

Start with easier questions and gradually increase them in difficulty until you find a level that works well for your audience. After al, you want to make sure that you’re not discouraging your followers from participating because they are too challenged by the questions.

A good example of how to utilize trivia questions in your Instagram polls comes from @parksproject, a National Parks apparel brand.

Parks project uses engaging trivia polls in Stories in order to help promote their brand’s goal, which is to contribute to the preservation of the national parks across the US.

Each week, they create a multi-question trivia quiz using Instagram’s story polls.

This simple game that they create for their following is presented each week on Tuesdays. It has helped them to establish a routine of visiting their profile to engage further with it.

At the end of the game, they include a link to help drive traffic to their website. An easy and subtle way to help direct Instagram users to your products and content!

When designing Stories like these, don’t forget to remember the rightStories’ dimensions, to make sure nothing gets cropped off!

• Gauge interest for new items

Picture this: you’re a small retail shop that can only carry a limited amount of items. You’ve come to a standstill between two similar items. You’ve asked partners and employees and no one can help you make a decision. Why not just ask the people who are likely to be purchasing this item — like your followers?

Retail and restaurants can use this Instagram poll idea alike on their Instagram stories. You can ask your followers whether or not they’d purchase a specific item or if they would prefer one color/style over another.

The best execution of this strategy that I’ve seen is when boutiques (and smaller sized businesses) use this guide their upcoming offerings. A shoe brand@mgemi does a great job at surveying their followers though such polls.

M.Gemi has been seen using polls when they receive new samples from their suppliers. They want to make sure their new items are trendy but not too off the beaten path that it will turn away their current customer base.

In the example below, for instance, the responses rejected the item, so the brand was able to better tailor their choices to consumer desires:

• Curate content better using polls

There’s a very easy way to ensure that your audience is enjoying the content that you’re publishing. How? By asking them straight!

When deciding what content to post, you should always rely on your marketing strategy and the knowledge of your target audience on Instagram. To make that knowledge even more specific, you can use Instagram polls to “test” your content before you post it in the feed!

Before you decide to test a new content type or post about things you haven’t before, throw a simple poll asking your followers whether they’d be interested in this kind of content at all. This is an effective way to measure whether your followers’s interests and build a good content strategy!

On top of that, this can also help ensure that you aren’t losing followers for unrelatable content.

And finally, it opens up a conversation between you and your followers. Your followers will feel valued since you are trying to personalize content based on their preferences.

@letterfolk uses this Instagram poll idea to help plan future content for the company’s Instagram account.

Recently, they posted behind-the-scenes Stories that showed how photoshoots happen for their products. At the end of the Story, they simply asked their followers if they wanted to see more of the behind-the-scenes content. The result? An overwhelmingly positive response, which gave the brand a clear idea of what their followers enjoy watching and interested in learning about.

-Drive website visits from Instagram polls

Driving traffic to your website is perhaps one of the best Instagram poll ideas you can have. You don’t need to pay for ads, so it’s free traffic I’m talking about!

This approach allows for a high level of customization. You can drive traffic to specific product pages, category pages, or even just to a specific article that is looking for more traffic!

Since you can be super flexible with what content you’re promoting, both emoji sliders and polls will work well in your Story. This Instagram poll idea can be combined with other ideas I’ve presented above (such as trivia), but it can also stand alone.

@target, a traditional brick-and-mortar retailer, makes use of this strategy to help drive product sales on their website by offering their followers choices between different products. Upon swiping up, Target brings you to a page that shows the featured products and then also shows similar products within the category.

-Provide more response options with an emoji slider

Instagram Story polls offer a simple avenue of engagement not available elsewhere on the platform. However, with the traditional Instagram poll you are limited to only providing two options.

The emoji slider is a great way to provide more options when posing a question in your Story. You can use the slider as a spectrum on which answers can fall or just as a way to host more than 2 options on your poll.

The biggest wedding media group,@theknot, uses the emoji slider to provide more options to their follower base for simple questions and, most importantly, an outlet for engagement on their profile.

-Keep up with the trends

Putting a poll that’s related to what’s trending now is an easiest-to-implement Instagram poll ideas to entertain your following.

Big sports event coming up this weekend? Ask your followers who they think will win.

Is a show premiering for the season? See if your followers are watching.

Trying some food that may be out of the box for some people? See if your followers would be daring to try it as well.

This Instagram poll idea has a ton of flexibility and availability for personalization. Try around with different options and see what your following enjoys seeing.

@tacobell, everyone’s favorite fast-food Mexican chain, uses this strategy to further engage their followers on Instagram. For both the college football playoffs and the World Series, Taco Bell used Instagram polls in order to further connect to their followers.

The variation of questions help ensure that their followers don’t get bored and interact with the brand outside of just tacos.

-Build suspense & hype it up

Have a big announcement for you brand coming soon? Perhaps a new product line is dropping or you’re adding a new section of content to your blog? Or maybe you need to push an old product that deserves some love?

One of the most simple Instagram poll ideas is to bring attention to these upcoming launches and hype things up a little. You can poll in a variety of ways, from simply asking if your followers are excited for the release of a new product, to gauging if they were aware of it in the first place, to showing how someone could actually use it.

Tree tent company, @tentsile, and makeup retailer @sephora, are two great brands to exemplify.

Recently, Tentsile used this strategy to promote a new productthat they were releasing. They provided a sneak peek of the new tent and asked if their followers were excited about its future release. They received a largely positive response which solidified support for this new product.

Similarly, Sephora used an Instagram poll to promote a product that they already offered. They promoted it in a way that pushed at a pain point for its consumers and offered the solution. Users are able to swipe up at the bottom of the story and be linked directly to the product collection.

Use this approach in whatever way aligns with your brand. If you have a big project coming up, make sure that your following knows about it as well!

-Just for fun

Finally, using Instagram polls doesn’t always have to have a greater reason behind it. Adding a very simple emoji slider to your picture can change up your posts without much effort!

Add one to your post to show off the space you’re at for the day, a picture-worthy meal you ate, or anything that you think is worth the followers’ attention!

Take example from @wework. This coworking space has hundreds of locations across the globe, and has worked hard to highlight the creative spaces that their team has designed. The company used simple emoji sliders in their Instagram polls to show them off. While this wouldn’t be enough information to gauge interest in future design, this is Instagram poll idea is great to simply add an element of interactivity to your Stories. Let alone, it’s easy to do!

Conclusion

Instagram polls are a great way to spice up your Stories and provide greater engagement for your content. This article covered some fundamental Instagram poll ideas that help you connect with your followers in a meaningful way, offer them an opportunity to interact with your brand, while driving traffic to your product pages.

The key here is to be imaginative, create quality content — and track your success with Instagram Stories analytics to see where you stand.

Did you like these Instagram poll ideas?
What else would you like to add?