Linkedin Launches Facebook Style Engagment Polls

LinkedIn groups have been around for a long time and with over a million of them in existence, users clearly see then as a great way of engaging with other users on the platform. For all their success though, the feature set within the groups has always been pretty limited but the good news is that today they are launching “Polls” which will be a great new tool to create engagement for group admins.

The funny thing about these polls is that they are yet another example of Linkedin creating carbon copies of Facebook features, and they haven’t even really tried to change the design in any meaningful way. I’ve always been surprised at just how active some people are in groups so it is great to see Linkedin start to offer additional tools.  Hopefully this will be the first of many because it would be great to see a much richer experience. As Linkedin are saying themselves about the launch:

A key reason our members use LinkedIn Groups is to share insights with like-minded professionals. Voting on polls now provides the same quick convenience of clicking “Like”, but with also the richer point of view of a comment.

We’ve also seen in testing that many members elaborate further on their choice in the familiar comments area that we’ve provided once you vote in a poll.Plus, in open groups, any member of LinkedIn can vote on a poll, just as they can “Like” any discussion or comment in an open group.

You can see people using these for a whole range of reasons, but I think they are especially useful for companies and brands who want to do some very targeted market research within the business community.