LinkedIn Polls...

I don't know about you, but my newsfeed is stuffed-full of LinkedIn polls.

Now, don't get me wrong, valuable research giving data and insights in to what's going on in our world is a vital part of making informed decisions...but most polls are NOT providing valuable insights. What they are...is vacuous clickbait.

These are some of what I have seen scrolling though my newsfeed this morning.

• Is there a tool that you've always wanted to try using but haven't yet?
• What have you been labelled at work?
• Which Grand Prix would you like to attend?
• Which of the following describes your employment status?

What is the point in any of these?

Do they provide any insights? Do they move me closer to you? Are the showing why I should want to work with you? Do they help me better understand what you do and how you can help me?

No, none of the above. What they do is waste my time and the time of others and clog-up our newsfeeds.

Even polls that on the face of it might provide valuable insights (like the sort Gartner run) such as "do you think digital marketing will grow or contract over the next 12 months" are fundamentally floored.

The problem with this sort of poll is that it fails to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance in most people's thinking which is an inability to separate what they think will happen from what they hope will happen. A good example of this is entering the Lottery - do you think you're going to win? No. Do you hope you're going to win? Yes. Therefore you pay and enter...knowing full well that you have more chance of being struck by lightning every day for a week than winning a life changing sum of money.

In view of this I ran the following poll last week: Are polls simply clickbait?

• Yes
• No
• This is clickbait, stop it!

The results for this were, not surprisingly, as follows:

84% of people thought that polls were waste of time

Now, if this is genuinely what people think we all need to be very careful before we launch in to creating a poll.

Yes, I know that the number of responses we get on a poll is more than the engagement that we might get on a typical post and therefore we feel good about the "success" we have achieved but at what cost? If you ask stupid questions you're likely to i) get stupid answers, and ii) make people think that all you do is...ask stupid questions. Neither of these is valuable for for you.

So, before you embark on running a poll you should be asking yourself the following questions:

• Why am I doing this and what am I hoping to learn? If you are trying to benchmark your company's performance agains the industry average a "are you happy with your current provider - yes/no" is a good question (obviously not actually asked like that though).
• How am I going to report the results back to the respondents and how is this going to shape my thinking? Obviously when I complete your poll I get to see how other's have voted...but the "wisdom of crowds" seldom provides real wisdom (a quick glance in the direction of global politics will show that) so what is my "expert narrative" going to be on interpreting the data?
• Is this worthy of my audience's time and is there some value in it for them? Like with "CX" running polls only wins you favour if they genuinely are trying to make things better for your audience rather than for you.

The reason all this matters is that LinkedIn is currently going through some fairly major changes in functionality, policy and features and if you keep running valueless polls there might well be a price to pay for this.

So, in summary, LinkedIn polls can be hugely valuable...but often aren't. A well constructed and thought through poll can be instrumental in gauging your audience's feelings and knowledge on a topic but you must be clear about what actions you're going to take as a result of running a poll and if the answer is "not any...I just would like to know" you are probably better off simply writing a post.