Increasing user interactivity through voting polls

It’s been a while since our last Tactical Thinking post hasn’t it? One of the draw backs of being a small company, something has to go on the back-burner when you get too busy.

Well, we’re back on the business blogging buzz with some new thoughts and ideas to share with you. Our latest project, amphitheatre, has provided us with some amazing insights into the world of large-scale, multi-author blogging. First on the agenda; how to increase user interactivity through voting polls.

Some call it link-baiting. I think of it as improving a site’s user-interactivity to increase the number of return visitors.

First, let’s just clarify why one would want to increase their web site’s user-interactiveness. If a web site truly engages it’s users there is a greater chance of those users coming back to the site, improving the number of repeat visits as well as visitor loyalty. Think about some of the web sites that you visit on a regular basis. I think you’ll find that many of them encourage your involvement in one aspect or another.

Polls and surveys are a strong method to encourage this user-interactivity.

Why run a poll on your site

Polls and surveys not only provide opportunity to interact with a web site but they give visitors the opportunity to voice an opinion and even see the results of a topic that interests them. But that’s not all…

• They start discussions, which in turn increases repeat visits.
• They can provide you with valuable research statistics for your product or business.
• They can increase the number of incoming links as people frequently send the URL on to others.
• And, probably most importantly, they demonstrate that your web site is alive and kicking!

How to set up a poll

Adding a poll or survey to your web site is not as difficult as you might think. There’s a variety of freely available resources on the net that can make the process super-simple. Check out PollDaddy and Quiz-o-Matic ‘76 for some examples. However, there’s a little more to it than just installing and creating a new poll – think strategy! Here’s an excellent ‘how to’ article on different polling techniques.

At Tactic Group we run many of our sites and blogs (including this one) on the Wordpress platform. There’s a fantastic plugin available on Wordpress, called WP-Polls that we use frequently. We’ve even got some examples for you…

A few months back we decided to run a photo competition on our amphitheatre blog. Whilst we didn’t receive as many photographic entries as we would have liked, when it came to voting time our traffic increased by about 1000% over the space of two days. We were quite astounded at this dramatic increase.

Granted, we had some nice prizes up for grabs and there was definitely some underlying motivations (as the public decided who the winners were), but what a great way to increase traffic and encourage user-interaction on a web site!

We’ve since been embracing polls in a variety of forms; the latest one being a new survey at the same site, designed more for research purposes than increasing traffic. We’ll be following this survey with another poll very soon, delving a little deeper into the habits, needs and wants of the amphitheatre readers.

Share your polling ideas right here

We’d love to hear about your ideas for polls and surveys. We may even be able to help evolve an idea into a viable solution. Please, we encourage you to comment below with any thoughts you have on the matter. Thanks.

Tags: amphitheatre

This entry was posted by Posted by Keith on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 8:25 am, and is filed under Blogging, Web tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.