How to Use LinkedIn Polls for Lead Generation

On 12 May, Linkedin introduced polls - finally catching up with other social media platforms. And with the larger organic reach (to encourage feature adoption) - it is an amazing tool for collecting feedback, new subscribers, gauging sentiment, as well as... generating highly targeted leads. In this post, we will briefly describe how to use LinkedIn Polls, what to use them for, and how to leverage them for segmented lead generation. All on the basis of a recent case study!

How LinkedIn Polls Work - Creating a LinkedIn Poll

LinkedIn polls are created in the same place where regular posts: you simply need to click on 'start a post' on LinkedIn, and then select the 'poll' option from bottom right:

Then, you will see the poll creation modal:

Unfortunately, the polls are quite limited: both in terms of the number of answers you can have (4) and the number of characters you can use in the question (140) and answers (30 only!)

This makes LinkedIn Polls a lot more limited than Facebook polls. Unlike Facebook polls, LinkedIn Polls don't allow appending images to the answers either.

This is what the finished poll looks like:

People can vote by simply clicking on the options.

You can set the poll to run for 1-2 weeks.

How to use LinkedIn Polls

Now, probably more important than how to create Linkedin polls is the question what to use them for.

First of all - you can use the polls for only multiple-choice questions - so if you're using them for collecting feedback, you need to be really careful no to ask 'leading questions' - ones that already bias the reader and suggest the answer.

So, Linkedin Polls are best for:

• Finding out specific opinions on binary choices (YES/ NO)  - E.g. Should we keep the talks available after the conference? Should we keep the Social Tips Calendar feature? 

• Finding out how your users use a specific feature of your product, e.g. what do you use online courses for in your business? A) Educating Customers B) Onboarding new hires C) As an Upsell D) For marketing - repurposing content
• And finally for qualified, targeted, perfectly segmented lead generation ???? See the mini-case study below! ????

Using Linkedin Polls for Targeted Lead Generation

And finally - what you have been all looking for - how to generate leads using Linkedin Polls.

So - let me start with a little bit of a background story.

In April 2020 I was asked to organise a virtual conference for product managers.

The target number of subscribers was 1,500.

This was pretty challenging.

I went the usual route of Facebook ads (which failed completely), activating the speakers to share on social media (worked pretty well) and using partners' newsletters and social media posts (also worked well).

But 5 days away from the summit (1 June) I was still nearly 700 attendees away from my target.

So - I turned to LinkedIn polls and asked questions related to the conference talks, that segmented the respondents by very specific interests:

I also asked them which talks the respondents would like to attend most.

Then, I shared the polls on my profile and in relevant groups:

The response was quite overwhelming:

All these people were targeted, qualified leads - that told me exactly what they wanted.

Now - all I had to do was just follow up with them.

Following up on the poll respondents

So I did - I sent them targeted invitation to exactly the talk that corresponded to their problem, opinion or request.

I sent them a connection request with a short message + the talk link rather than a message (to save the Linkedin messaging credits ????)

And the response was overwhelming: nearly 20% ended signing up for the summit.

You can easily use this technique too - so go ahead, use LinkedIn polls for lead generation before they become 'old and tired'!