Have you ever wanted to quickly create a poll and ask for peoples feedback, for example inviting your community to choose a topic for your live stream or webinar, asking your colleagues to choose a location for your next off-site meeting, or engaging with your employees about their feedback on a recent organisational announcement?
There are lots of different tools you can use including polls that are built within social media apps such as Twitter polls.
However sometimes we need a really quick and easy solution that is independent of the platform we are using and which can be public or private.
That is why I was intrigued to test out the new desktop app Fast Poll.
If you prefer to listen to the audio of this tutorial you can find it here.
The app is free at the moment – the developer has plans to introduce premium features and is keen to hear from users about the features they would like to see added.
To get started you can head to Fast Poll to create your free account. When you have created your account you will see your dashboard which is where all the polls you have created or voted on are saved.
You will be prompted by a button on your dashboard to create a poll then you can:
1 – Enter your topic for your poll
2 – Add the options for people to choose from when voting
3 – Add additional answers
4 – Choose to make the poll public, which means it will appear on the Fast Poll site feed and on your profile. Or you can make your poll private which means that only people you share it with will be able to see it and participate.
You will then be invited to select a category for your poll. I’d like to see my additional categories added such as business and technology.
After selecting your category, click the button to create your poll.
Once you have created your poll you will be able to access the poll url to share with your audience and invite them to provide feedback.
To see an example of what a live poll looks like find my poll about content calendars for live streams here and access my poll shown in the image below about the new Facebook Lasso App here
When you share your poll to people they will be able to share the poll to their networks or copy the link – even if you made the poll private.
Hopefully, in a future update this will not be so easily available and there will be options for people to add an alternative to your topics if you permit them to do so.
The other thing to note is that if you decide on a different order for your questions in your poll you will need to retype them as you can not re-order the entries.
I am hoping the developer will also make it possible to close the poll and delete it – at the moment I can not find those options on the dashboard.
I tested the app out on my iPhone and Android phones and it was beautifully rendered and is easy for people to submit their response – note that respondents do not have to create an account on Fast Poll to engage and leave a response.
One thing I noticed about using Fast Poll on mobile is that the share button seems not to be available – perhaps the developer will add that in a future update.
On your dashboard, you will then be able to see the archive for the polls you have created alongside the number of votes they have received.
Within Fast Poll there is also the option for you to add an avatar, bio and your social media links that will appear on your public profile. It would be great if there was also a live url link for our website.
So if you are looking for an easy to use polling tool for your marketing or employee engagement programmes, why not check out Fast Poll and if you have ideas for features you would like to see introduced make sure you let the developer know.
Let me know if your favourite easy to use polling app and if you plan to use Fast Poll.
If you have questions about how to get creater engagement with your marketing or employee communications campaigns, you can schedule a meeting with me.
