Instagram Adds More Response Options in Stories’ Polls

If you have tried to add a poll to your Instagram story recently, you might have noticed an alert informing you about the update. Instagram now adds more response options to polls which used to be strictly binary before.  It’s supposed to allow social media managers to up the audience engagement, charging dialogs with more sense.

As you create a story now and intend to add a poll, you’ll see a notification saying, “We’ve updated the Poll sticker”. Now it allows for offering up to four options in your poll. You don’t have to necessarily use all four: starting with the familiar two, you can add another option and then yet one more. The way these polls look is similar to the previous version, with one difference: now you can choose the font color of the question text.

Now polls resemble quizzes, with one significant difference: a quiz implies there is a correct answer, and the rest are incorrect. This makes using them as polls, though possible, sort of anticlimactic for those who chose a different answer. Polls do not imply there are correct or incorrect answers: they just offer up to four options, and the viewer selects the most relevant of them.

The updated polls become now a more valuable tool for getting feedback from the audience on any question that doesn’t fit into a binary yes-no scheme. The new polls offer more in-depth exploration of the questions you ask your audience. Like all new features of Meta projects, though, this one rolls out gradually, so maybe your instance of Instagram will receive it days later.

Will you be using the polls feature more actively now that it has more options? Have you ever been using it at all? And what about responding? No matter if you are a social media manager or a regular user, we’d like to hear your feedback. As we want more than just poll replies, we invite you to our comments where you can always choose your own answer and share it with us.