I want to create a simple poll on Facebook to ask my friends a question. How do I do this as easily as possible?
Facebook polls are definitely a fun way to ask people to choose between two alternatives, though they are indeed limited to two alternatives so if you want to ask them to choose between more options you might end up frustrated! Then again, each option on your poll can be text, an image, or an animated GIF – or a combination of these! – so it doesn’t mean you can’t do something fun and colorful.
The idea of using a poll rather than a regular status update post with a question embedded is that if it’s easier for people to click to vote that you’ll get more input and better data, whether you’re asking about choosing between two dresses, vacation destinations or preferred order of toppings in a hamburger emoji. You know, the important stuff! 🙂
Let’s jump over to Facebook and have a look at the steps involved in creating a poll. It’s easy.
To start, a standard status update prompt:
So many options, so little time, right? 🙂
To get to the Facebook poll option, click on the “•••” button. Lots and lots of options appear:
You can see the Poll option is on the lower left. Click on it and you’ll have the template for a two-choice poll, all ready to fill out:
At this point you can safely ignore everything in the lower half, but as you can see, the Facebook poll is comprised of four elements: The poll question, the two possible answers, and the duration of the poll. For the question, you can add images, emoji, link to other pages and people on Facebook and the rest of the “usual” choices. For each possible answer, you can use text, an image or video, or an animated GIF.
I’ll make a simple poll so the choices will be just text. The question tags a Facebook page – FIFA World Cup – and I’ll eventually add an emoji too so there’s something visually interesting. For duration you can see the options:
All looks good, so let’s publish it with a click on “Post“. After a few seconds here’s what everyone sees:
Easy, simple and fun. As people answer, the answer bars actually change color to show relative weightings of the answers too, a quick visual cue about which is more popular!
Pro tip: If you’re looking for Facebook help, we have tons of it on this site, so please check it out. And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook too as we often post content there that’s not on this site!