Typically when we think about market research surveys, we think of questionnaires that have 20, 30, or even more questions. Getting qualified people to complete these questionnaires has become a serious challenge. One alternative is the single-question Facebook poll.

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How to Use Facebook Polls for Fun and Profit
Typically when we think about market research surveys, we think of questionnaires that have 20, 30, or
even more questions. Getting qualified people to complete these questionnaires has become a serious
challenge. One alternative is the single-question poll. After all, you’re much more likely to get high
response and low dropout rates if you can simply say, “Hi, we have a single question we’d like your
opinion on,” rather than requesting a novel’s worth of responses.
Facebook is making polling insanely easy these days, and several polling applications are available on
Facebook. Creating a single-question poll is a snap, and then you can make it available on your fan page
or your personal page, or you might invite friends to take it.
Let’s say your company has a fan page with hundreds or thousands of fans. You can simply post the poll
on the page. No fan page? Facebook also gives you the option to “purchase sample.” Only want men and
women from the U.S., or only interested in men from Mexico for your particular poll? No problem. While
gender and country are currently the only 2 options offered, I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook came out
with more powerful select options soon.
Facebook Polls: The Good News
1. Speed. A key advantage of Facebook polls, clearly, is speed. Results may be available within an
hour.
2. Numbers. With over 600,000,000 users as of early 2011 (compare that to the US population of
310,000,000), you’ve got a lot of potential respondents.
3. Cost. Having done some experimenting with Facebook polls, I can tell you it’s very affordable and
perfectly appropriate for certain types of topics. Placing a poll on Facebook is free as of March
2011 (though of course that’s subject to change), and their current sample pricing is very low.
Facebook Poll Limitations
1. Limited selects. Currently, you can choose from just gender and country (though again, I am sure
this will change soon given how many options they offer for selecting audience members for their
ads).
2. It’s “only” Facebook. Obviously, not everybody is on Facebook. While it does represent a broad
mix of ages and countries and has a pretty even gender mix, it’s likely not the best match for
specific groups such as business decision makers. My experience so far is that it’s good for
consumer-type topics more than business-to-business polling. But if you’re running a business-to-
business company and you’ve got a fan page, it’s worth testing.

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The Challenges of Polls in General
1. One Question. It’s a single question, so you have to craft that question carefully and understand
who’s responding, keeping in mind that there’s a lot you don’t know about those respondents.
2. Polls don’t represent everyone. Some skeptics would say that the people who opt into these types
of polls may not be representative of the broader population. Seems to me a single-question poll
has a higher probability of broad response than a longer survey, so perhaps it balances out.
3. It may raise more questions. When you look at the results of a single-question poll it can raise
more questions. You don’t have the benefit of a logical branching or skip pattern to follow up on
specific answers. You have little context. Imagine a scenario where we ask participants to select
which of a list of 5 features is most important when buying a tablet device. Say the poll finds that
one item markedly stands out. On one hand that’s great, but on the other it raises the question of
“why”? And how might that have varied by customer type, etc.? Cool data, but it leaves us
begging for more.
4. Limited Uses. A single question can give you directional data; maybe even help you uncover
some interesting things worth further investigation. But you aren’t going to make a million-dollar
decision based on such data.
A Simple Test
I did a test the other day for $15.00. I selected ‘men and women from the U.S.’ and had 50 responses
within two hours (that’s 30 cents per response). Granted I don’t know much about these people, and I
asked a pretty generic question, but it was very fast and affordable. For topics where some data is better
than no data, that can be totally appropriate.
Polls Are a Viable Option for Fast, Directional Data
Given the caveats that we don’t know much about the respondents and we don’t know enough to make
extrapolations, there’s nothing wrong with asking a quick question of the Facebook population. Not every
project warrants a big budget or weeks of effort. And with 600,000,000 users, there is a huge sample
source just clicks away.
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Original publication date: 3/18/2011