Sponsored Polls on Facebook – A New Medium for Market Research?
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I just opened up my Facebook Account Today and on my Newsfeed Page I saw a sponsored Poll.
 
The name of the brand on this poll has not been mentioned. A few months back I saw ads by Mobango in my Newsfeed but I refrained from clicking through primarily because it seemed pissing off.
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Facebook has an option where users can create customized polls and then target the polls on the basis of interest. They need to pay per response – a maximum of 100 responses can be taken into account and the maximum cost for 1 market research campaign is $26 – within the reach of the average Joe.
 
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One notable feature that is missing is Geo Targeting of Polls. As you can see, my feed received a poll, which is obviously American in Nature, and thus I am the wrong prospect, as a result of which there is a tendency of results being flawed. So I doubt it will be used for any kind of accurate research. And I doubt people will pay for such ‘fun’ polls. So I think the whole exercise is inherently flawed.
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I don’t have an idea with respect to how the analytics will be provided (this is really important for research).
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Orkut too has polls which are often used to conduct research within groups. They missed out on an opportunity to monetize. Facebook seems to be following the right model by maintaining a mix between free and paid services within it’s networks. The free services are good enough to maintain traction and stickiness in the network and the it’s trying to make the paid services worthwhile enough for users to actually put them to use.
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Orkut has not really paid a lot of attention to monetization and creating a push vs pull approach within its network with respect to its service offerings. Will this cost Google in the long run?
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ADDITION TO ARTICLE
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Correction - Geo Targeting does exist. But the thing is if you choose to geo target then you cannot target by Interest, and vice versa. So the above mentioned concern about accuracy of research still exists. Moreover you can choose to add 5 option to the poll. I was thinking of spending some money to conduct a poll on ‘Who will win the IPL’ on the India Network but i decided not to because there are 8 teams - again the research would be flawed
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Correction - Geo Targeting does exist. But the thing is if you choose to geo target then you cannot target by Interest, and vice versa. So the above mentioned concern about accuracy of research still exists. Moreover you can choose to add 5 option to the poll. I was thinking of spending some money to conduct a poll on ‘Who will win the IPL’ on the India Network but i decided not to because there are 8 teams - again the research would be flawed
This is a really old feature. We used it for firstphera.com almost a year back. Geo-targeting, as you noted, is possible. It provides a breakdown of results by age buckets and sex.
Its an awesome tool for cheap market research for startups - ex. we did a quick poll to measure what screen resolution people normally use.
yea its quite old. 1st time a poll appeared in my feed so i thought i’d blog it! It seems to be an awesome tool but the limitations make it quite tricky with respect to market research.
@ Vikas,
knowing the screen resolution is even simpler. get statcounter / Google Analytics on your website. that’s it. No need to run a poll for that though! & I tell you the most used resolution is 1024×768.
@Rupesh -
Yes, google analytics tells you that - but it wouldn’t if you website isn’t launched yet :). It used the statistics to inform our very early design decisions