5 Tips to Survey
Your Social Media Audience

Choosing the correct social media platforms to use is essential when deciding how you will reach your audience.

Surveying your audience is vital in understanding what platforms they use the most and how often they use them. It’s a great way to get an in-depth understanding of your audience. Surveys help you learn what your customers think about your product or service, which in turn allows you to provide an even better experience for them in the future.

To help you make the best out of online surveys, here are the best tips that will help you survey your social media audience:

1. What you ask is important

Asking questions is a great way to engage your brands’ audiences on social media. And more engagement means more reach.

You can conduct a few different types of surveys. Some might want to ask for feedback on your work (for example), while others will want to know about their followers in order to create services they think their audience wants.

Here’s what established brands are doing. Nordstrom asked questions in their Facebook post caption about which footwear is the audience’s favorite for fall.

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Brands like Edible Arrangements used social media questions as part of their contest.

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Asking questions is a great strategy to have an engaged audience. That said, make sure to keep the survey crisp.

As per a study, a survey with over 12 questions or a survey that takes longer than 5 minutes to complete notices a 15% slump in response rate. The drop is up to 40% if the time taken to complete the survey surpasses 10 minutes.

2. Create a short survey landing page

You can learn about your site visitors by integrating surveys right to your landing pages. A survey that asks questions like how they found your site belongs to a landing page.

Or you can even take a short quiz/assessment as Persona does. The company takes The Persona Vitamin assessment that helps them create a personalized vitamin pack for their customers.

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Also, notice the reviews the company has put up. These are trust elements that prompt visitors to go for the assessment.

It is best to get in touch with a website design team to ensure that you have a powerful website that brings in traffic, generates leads, and drives conversions on all devices.

3. Use engaging visuals in your survey post

Is a picture worth a thousand words? The right image can undoubtedly convey a lot of information, thereby making for a more engaging survey that gets higher response rates.

In addition, you can use images to illustrate examples or generate discussion on forums and other social sites. It’s hard to argue with the power of visuals.

Learning how to use visuals and iconography in online surveys effectively will skyrocket engagement. As per 40% of marketers, 51 to 80% of businesses will use visual content in 2021.

Info passed on together with visuals is more memorable than info presented without them. It is because visuals can improve attention and cognitive processing while reading the choices within questions.

Here’s how Hem & Stitch used the smiley scale in their survey, making it easy for clients to choose a rating.

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This kind of visual survey question draws out an intuitive response.

Or, if you are gathering website feedback, you can implement the Click Map question. It will give you immediate feedback on your customers’ preferences or where they need a little assistance.

4. Use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram polls

Admit it. Social media polls are fun. They are a great way to engage the audience, understand your customers, involve customers in decision making, increase customer loyalty, and drive traffic to your website. Live polls can further help you to receive instant feedback.

From funny poll questions to “would you rather” questions and the quiz poll, the ideas are limitless.

Here’s how Palmers, the skin and hair care brand created a quiz poll for their Instagram stories to reinforce the connection with its followers.

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Polls can also be used to show off your product catalog. If you look at the poll created by IKEA USA below, the brand is smartly showing its followers the range of kitchen product options. The followers are also asked to vote for their favorites.

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This idea works great if you are trying to promote a product line.

Offer incentives to drive more responses

As per studies, offering incentives can increase response rates by 10 to15%. The response rate will depend on the quality and attractiveness of what you are offering to your target audience.

Incentives could be monetary, sample product or service, coupon, discounts, sweepstakes, donation, raffle, the whitepaper, or giveaway.

For instance, Pizza Pizza offered a monetary reward as a voucher that the customers could use on their next purchase.

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When you offer such monetary incentives, the likelihood of getting repeat orders from customers who complete the survey increases exponentially.

Here’s an example of a sweepstake from Grand Plaza Hotel.

The hotel wanted to make some big changes at the property, for which it wanted feedback from vacationers who stayed at the hotel. All participants who completed the survey were considered for a chance to win a complimentary two-night stay.

That’s a Wrap!

Creating a successful social media strategy is difficult because you have to understand your audience -- who they are, what they want, and how they think.

However, surveying your social media audience can give you answers to these questions. In fact, by surveying your followers on social networks, you'll get insight into what's working and what's not.

That said, running surveys is not enough. You have to do it right.

Follow the aforementioned tips to survey your social media audience and make the most of it.