Do you wish you had a clearer picture of your audience on social media so you can create better content for them? Or better yet, ask them directly what they want to see?
Most people consider social media surveys as a way to increase engagement. And they are. But that’s only part of the story.
When used correctly, surveys and polls give you something more valuable. Real insight into what your audience really cares about.
In this article, you’ll learn how to use social media surveys and polls to understand your audience and create content they really want.
Let’s enter.
1. Understand why audience research is important
You might think that it’s enough to create any and all content that even remotely covers topics related to your niche, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Audiences are much more complex than that. There are likely multiple audiences within your niche. That’s why it’s important to personalize your content target audience.
This could be members of your niche who are of a certain skill level (beginner, intermediate, advanced, or expert) or who are interested in a more specific subtopic (electric guitar as opposed to the broader “guitar” niche).
If you’re not sure who your target audience is, a few surveys or polls can help you identify it.
Audience research lets you discover anything you think can help you create better content, including:
- Subtopics that interest your audience
- What they think about certain topics
- The social media platforms they use
- When looking at social networks
- Why do they look at social networks?
- Whether they are satisfied with your content or not
2. Select a tool
You can poll locally on many social media platforms:
- Instagram – Add polls to stories. It’s under the Stickers menu.*
- Facebook – Add polls to stories.
- Twitter (X) – Create survey posts.
- YouTube – Create poll posts for the community badge.
- Bluesky – Not a native feature, but you can create queries with third-party apps.
- Topics – Add a query to the post.
- LinkedIn – Create a survey post.
*You can only add quizzes to reels. While they allow you to ask your audience a question, they force you to assign one option as the correct answer to that question. Surveys are based on feedback. Therefore, they are not intended to be the correct answer.
If you want to ask your audience multiple questions at once or get feedback from your TikTok audience, you’ll need to use a poll.
Here are a few survey tools you can use:
- ConvertBox – Not technically a survey or poll maker, but it has a survey-based opt-in form that allows your audience to segment themselves when they opt-in to your email list. This is a better option because you can easily get leads when/if it makes sense.
- Google Forms – A free form tool that your audience is probably familiar with.
- Writing form – A simple survey and questionnaire maker. This allows you to create surveys that ask one question per page, as well as polls where each option appears. It comes with templates and lots of marketing features.
- SurveyMonkey – A simple survey and survey builder with templates, marketing features and in-depth analytics.
- SurveyPlanet – A simple survey tool great for creating surveys that show one question at a time. Comes with templates.
- Quiz and Survey Master – Survey plugin for WordPress.
If you go the survey builder route, you’ll need to promote your survey link.
Here are some methods you can use to promote links on social media:
- Promote it directly in the post itself. This is not an option on TikTok and Instagram.
- Add the link as your bio link. This deletes your current bio link.
- Add to link link-in-bio pagea simple web page where you can add a few links.
Shorby is a suitable tool for the third option. It is very easy to use.
However, it is a paid tool.
You can use it as an alternative They went viral. It’s primarily a social media planner, but offers a free plan that includes access to their bio-in-bio page tool.
Their bio-in-bio page tool also happens to be one of the best on the market.
Get started with Viraly for free.
3. Create a survey
Polls are great if you just need to ask your audience one simple question.
Many social media polls only allow you to add four options, but if you use a custom poll or poll builder, you can add unlimited options.
The most important thing about a poll is that it allows your audience to choose only one option.
You can learn a lot about your audience’s preferences by asking them a simple question, giving them four options, and allowing them to choose only one of those options.
Polls posted as Instagram and Facebook stories expire after 24 hours. This is because Instagram and Facebook stories themselves expire after 24 hours.
Twitter (X) allows you to choose a period of up to a week. This means that your audience has up to a week to respond to the survey before it appears in their feeds.
Try using polls on social media to:
- Opinion – Ask your audience what they think about a topic.
- Example: What is the most rated electric guitar brand?
- Insight – Learn more about your audience in general.
- Example: What is your favorite brand of electric guitar?
- Analyst – Learn more about your audience’s habits.
- Example: How often do you exercise?
4. Create a multiple choice survey
If you think your audience might make more than one choice, create a multiple-choice survey instead.
When you use native social media polls, your audience can only choose one option, so you’ll need to use the poll tool and add only one question to it.
It’s best to use the plural in your question so that your audience can choose more than one option. You can also put a short notice like “(select all that apply)” in parentheses.
Make sure you select the Checkboxes option in your survey tool and mark the question as “required”.
An example in Google Forms:
Use multiple-choice polls for the same purpose as a regular poll, but when you want your audience to be able to select more than one option.
If you want to get your audience to be more decisive, stick to single-choice polls. This will give you more accurate information because your audience will be more selective with their answers if they can only choose one.
Once your survey is complete, add it to your link-in-bio page on Instagram and TikTok or as a bio link on these platforms before promoting it.
5. Create a multiple choice survey
Surveys are fantastic tools use to conduct audience research. They allow you to learn more about your audience by asking a series of questions.
Social media content is ephemeral, so your query better be too. Try asking more than five questions to increase your chances of getting more completed surveys.
The most important thing is to make sure that each question is related to the same topic. If I ask the audience what their favorite brand of guitar is, I shouldn’t ask which guitarists are overrated.
The best thing about using surveys is the number of question types you can add to your survey. Specifically, text-based question types where your audience can enter a short or long answer.
This is a great option to include in case you’re worried you forgot to include something as an option.
Another useful thing about queries is the conditional logic features they unlock depending on the query tool you use.
Conditional logic is a feature that allows you to set up triggers and actions or “if-then-then” rules for your query.
For example, if your main question asks your audience “what’s your favorite brand of guitar” and one of your options is Ibanez, you can ask an additional question that appears when your audience selects Ibanez, such as “What guitar models do you own from Ibanez?”
Some survey builders, such as Typeform, have ranking question types that allow you to rearrange the options based on how your audience ranks them.
In general, surveys are an effective way to expand a question with additional questions, resulting in more information for you.
6. Use the data you get to optimize your social media marketing strategy
There’s a lot you can learn about social media by asking your audience simple questions.
If you’re in the guitar niche, knowing what brands your audience prefers lets you know which brands to focus on for reviews, out-of-the-box content, product demos, and tutorials.
If you ask your audience about other social media platforms they use, you will know which other platforms you should create content for.
Polls and surveys help you align your social media content and overall marketing strategy with what your audience wants to see.
Many platforms have analytics you can view. There are even dedicated ones social media analytics tools there. Plus, you can get a pretty good idea of your audience’s preferences by doing keyword research and product research.
But it’s one thing to guess what your audience prefers or wants to see. It’s another thing for them to tell you openly.
Make a list of any information that you think will help you understand your audience a little better. Then prepare questions and answers that will help you uncover this information.
Final thoughts
A lot of assumptions are involved when you start out as a blogger or content creator.
But once you have an audience, regardless of its size, you can start collecting quality data.
This is the most important information.
This will help you take a strategy based on guesswork and turn it into a solid strategy based on facts and hard data.
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