Facebook Polls Launches Tonight: Marketing Research Paradise
Michael Arrington
30 comments »
Facebook just launched a new product tonight called Facebook Polls - look for a link in the bottom navigation area next to “Advertising” on any Facebook page.
This is an advertising product that is designed to generate revenue. Users can able to create a poll question and up to five answer choices, and then target the poll based on gender, age, location or profile keyword.
The polls are not free - Facebook charges you a variable amount based on how quickly you want results. You tell Facebook how many results you want and how much you are wiling to pay per result. The more you offer, the more quickly results are returned to you. Prices currently range from $.10 to $1.00 per data point, plus an initial $5 insertion fee. Facebook will estimate the completion time for the poll based on how much you bid.
Polls appear in Facebook users’ news feed.
I imagine brand advertisers and other market researchers will love this product. It will give them quick and targeted insights into the tastes and preferences of Facebook’s 20+ million users in near real-time.
Mike, you miss one point. What’s my reason for filling it out? If it’s forced on me, will I just select anything? Am I receiving part of what FB is?
I guess the surveys could be a bit targeted but I would still take the results with a grain of salt.
I never knew there were so many “Michael Arrington” @ FB! Finally found ya.. send a friend request there
!!
BTW, Charing $$ for Polls sucks! Its free in Orkut though
!
Cheers,
Vinay
Allen while that’s a valid concern, it is not limited to facebook but the whole polling industry. And I’m guessing it’s been a problem for so long that professional pollers have pretty set procedures to offset the reckless votes.
I don’t think this will be too much more inaccurate than random phone polls.
Wayyy too much FB coverage in the blogosphere… lol
Hopefully we’ll be back to normal programming soon……
Time to really start monetizing the beast!
I won’t use it but I’m sure plenty will so, good call!
very nice feature … thanks for the heads up!
Zuckerberg is a sharp guy. Gifts, flyers, polls — he can make money from air!
Just another thing like gifts to make a free counterpart of… :-p http://apps.facebook.com/freegifts/
flyer’s were simple genius…wonder how much those pull in each month?
Interesting tool and not too expensive either which makes a change!
And of course, someone will make a free poll widget app thing and then everyone can create a huge variety of polls from the smart to the silly, and get the feedback from their own network. It won’t poll the whole site, but the freeness might muck up the initiative by so much noise-to-signal.
And yes, Facebook is this week’s Second Life. (Did you know you can buy zOMG fake things for REAL money on FB?! Heh, I’m not actually making that up… there’s something very subtle going on in FB, virtually speaking…)
I’d prefer a free poll site to utilize for my social networking site, Love Across Borders.
Allen has a good point. As users we’re not here to respond to polls to help facebook make more $. There needs to be some direct or indirect gain for users for this to really gain some traction. Profit sharing isn’t a likely possibility. FB-credit for purchasing gifts?
I think one point that’s missed here is what the population that answers the Facebook polls will look like. Certainly, one would have to look at the Facebook respondees as a self-selected audience, reducing the value of these polls to advertisers or marketers. So while it sounds good on the surface, I don’t think Facebook is going to see the flood of marketers and advertisers they expect, simply because the sample is both skewed and poorly defined, and therefore reduces its value.
FB users aren’t on facebook to make money. They buy gifts and do polls because it’s entertaining. If you pick the right poll topic and audience, people will answer it. When I see an apple video ad on a website I don’t click on it expecting a share of the money. I click on it because the ads are amusing. I think it’ll be a huge hit for any market researcher that wants to tap into the net-savvy 18-25 year olds.
There is now a new application on facebook which allows you to create questionnaires, surveys, polls, votes and petitions, answer them and invite your friends to answer them. You can display your answers to a questionnaire on your profile so people can get to know you better. We just launched it a couple of days ago, the questionnaires are up and running, polls votes and petitions will arrive in the next couple of days. In a few weeks time we hope to add commercial surveys where users get paid via paypal to answer surveys, but currently its all completely free, and you can view everyones answers to your surveys! We are adding more features all the time - it will soon be very powerful indeed. We are also willing to consider adding any feture you require on request!
Check it out:
http://apps.facebook.com/questionnaires
Best wishes,
Chris