LinkedIn Polls: conducting research within communities

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November 15, 2011

The strength of communities is the knowledge and experience that can be shared with each other. With LinkedIn Polls you can easily tap into ‘the wisdom of crowds’ and start a poll for free. Polls can be shared with your LinkedIn network and on Facebook or Twitter. LinkedIn Polls can be found in the Applications sidebar (via top-menu More – Your Applications). You can create up to 10 free polls at a time on LinkedIn to survey other members.

With polls you can quickly and cost effectively understand a group of people and analyse the results. These results can be categorised by demographic data such as company size, job title, age or gender. To get the best response to your poll, try these tips:

Be as brief as possible with your questions and answers. Shorter, well-written questions generally have higher response rates.
Don’t ask a leading question, which could influence your audience to answer in a specific way. For example, instead of “Do you commute long hours?” try “How long is your commute?”
Avoid overlapping ranges and values in your answers. And think about adding “None of these” or “other” as an option, in case the other answers don’t apply.
Construct your questions and answers carefully. Avoid spelling and grammar errors. Don’t use excessive punctuation and symbols that may confuse your readers.

The only format available for polls is a single question with up to five answers. Please also note that it’s not allowed to publish self-promotional polls (e.g. “How much do you like my company?”).

You can create a poll from within the Polls application by asking one question and offering up to 5 possible answer choices for your audience to vote on. After you install Polls you can: