One of my lovely colleagues in the Research team at work introduced me to Facebook Polls the other day.
Having the ability to canvass the opinions of 100 Facebook users for just $26 (complete 
with online results charts) and to turn it around in just 24 hours is A Good Thing. Being able to ask Prison Break fans whether they followed the series from Channel 5 to Sky or Leeds residents what they think about the development of the Headrow shopping centre for this kind of money is amazing.
But:
- you can only filter your audience by age OR gender OR location OR keyword
- obviously, the audience is exclusively facebook users so you aren’t getting a representative sample of the UK population
- you’ve no idea how robust the results are as ‘Facebook will not verify the statistical significance of response data’.
These are all A Bad Thing.
On balance, its going to be a usefull tool for last minute pitching and proving a point generally and its going to be interesting to see how other online brands respond – how about online polling on google based on search terms, using GeoTargeting and invoiced on a pay-per-click basis?
(facebook polls image by Dave & Bry)
Update: I tried to run a Poll on facebook recently and couldn’t find the functionality anywhere. I checked with the guys in the Digital team and apparantly the polling fucntion dissapeared a few months ago and doesn’t look likely to return any time soon.