Results from three polls on LinkedIn…
With the hottest real estate market in years, we thought it would be worthwhile to see what room people prefer. Using the poll feature available in a LinkedIn post, we released three posts over three weeks.
By gaining insight into preferences of your potential audience or even the larger population can help with ideas for content and especially for what areas, or in this case, rooms, to focus on in either photography, copy writing, social media posts, and ads.
Our methodology, while not necessarily scientific, yielded some interesting results.
Approach
Beginning on April 26, we released three poll “post” spaced about 10 days apart via the social media network LinkedIn.
Each poll ran for one week and consisted of four choices. Four choices are the maximum choice limit allowed in the polling feature on LI.
The poll was released as a post. The poll was open to all who wanted to participate and the post for the poll was released close to the same time each week but not necessarily the same of the week.
Released on April 26, we asked “What room do you enjoy spending the most time in?” Choices were Bathroom, Kitchen, Family Room, and Bedroom.
Realizing that with the pandemic having such an impact on work and home, we released Poll 2 which replaced the Bathroom choice with Home Office.
Poll 2 kept the question the same, just changed the choices.
Next was the final survey which intentionally changed the wording to What is the most important room.
Results and Thoughts
Views of the “poll post” ranged from 519 to 2,012. The first post garnered the 2,012, followed by 1,344 for the second, and 519 for the third.
While unfortunate that we didn’t have more consistency in views, it most likely has to do with changes LinkedIn makes to their algorithm as they roll out and refine new features. Coupled with the fact that when the polling feature was first rolled out, appeared to have priority in the algorithm. This led to content creators exploiting the feature to gain views. With “frivolous” polls such as “Does Pineapple Belong on Pizza” appearing in user feeds, user frustration grew, which may explain the reduction in reviews by the time we released the third post.
Response rates though increased.
- Third: 6.9%
- Second: 2.7%
- First: 2.4%
Comparing the results, “family room” appeared to ranked the highest when asked favorite room, but when asked “most important,” family room dropped to third place. Similarly, the “home office” choice, which tied with kitchen in the second survey, dropped to third in the last.
By changing the choices to home office from bathroom, family room surged, collecting 56 per cent of the votes.
Keeping the choices constant between polls two and three, but changing the words to “most important” from “favorite,” completely changed the ranked order, with Kitchen jumping to number one and Bedroom, which was eclipsed by home office, taking second place.
The overall result of this experiment in LinkedIn polls, shows why A/B testing is so important. Changing choices provides some anecdotal insight into preferences the kitchen, and family room. But changing wording showed dramatically different results.
It would be interesting for future surveys, to test five choices and see how the results compare to the originals. That gives us an idea! Keep an eye out in your LinkedIn feed, and be sure to follow me and Dunes Marketing on LinkedIn.