Dieter Petereit February 3rd, 2014

Social Polling by Opinion Stage: One-Year Pro-Account for Free

Votes and polls are nothing new. But before you yawn and turn to the next article, give me two seconds. Votes and polls done with Opinion Stage are not the ole fashioned feedback tools your mind first thinks of. Opinion Stage integrates the social component as it lets you interact with Social Media. The deeper insights you are about to receive are beyond comparison. Better even, today we give away two annual Pro Plans, worth 228 dollars, for free. All you need to do to win is place a comment below the following article.

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Opinion Stage Puts "Social" Into Polling

Social is the new black. Interacting with people on a personal basis sure offers loads more value than just attracting invisible masses. Of course could you put up a generic poll for your product, asking any visitor of your website to click if they like product A or B better. If all runs well, hundreds or thousands of visitors engage and click your poll.

Still, the question remains. What are the results worth? Without further information on who voted how from where with which background, the poll is just showing a tendency. I wouldn't build upon such a shallow response. What if you could drill into the results and actually see who voted for which alternative? Male, female, country - other demographics as well?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7xKNlWbk0s

Information like this could turn your poll results around. Probably B got voted more often, but those who voted A are the exact people you are trying to target. Would it not make loads more sense to pursue product A then? You know the answer.

And now, that you got it, you've already understood what Opinion Stage allows you to do. With Opinion Stage you get exactly that - qualified social poll results, sortable by different parameters. Get to know your potential customers better.

Besides being an instrument for corporate users, Opinion Stage is fun for everybody. Unsure whether to buy an iPhone or an Android? Place a poll on your blog or post it to Twitter. You could even post the poll to Facebook, which is part of the Premium aka paid plan, though. As a fun user you'll also not be able to apply any of the social filters I told you about before. All these are part of the Premium Plan for 228 dollars per year.

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Opinion Stage: Creating a Poll is Easy

Creating a poll is fast and easy. Simply establish an account over at Opinion Stage, which you can do via OAuth using Facebook, Twitter or Google+, or dedicated as an Opinion Stage account directly. Without further ado you are taken to the poll editor. Here you are able to choose between two poll variants. Multiple Choice lets you offer more than two answers, while Head-to-Head best fits the typical Yes or No choices. In this case the answers are placed side by side.

Opinion Stage allows you to decide whether you want to require social profiles, accept them optionally or not require them at all. The latter falls back to the anonymous voting we all know. I'd recommend you go for optional social profiles to not exclude anybody, yet get as many valuable social feedback as possible.

Now place your question, optionally add a description and some images or video even. Then, if you went for Multiple Choice, create as many answers as you see fit.

Per default, all polls are social enabled which basically means that people will be asked for sharing after having placed their votes. Imagine how much more attention your poll can potentially receive as soon as enough people share it to their friends, circles, followers and what not.

Following is a real-life example of how your personal poll could look:

online poll by Opinion Stage

Opinion Stage: Win Your Pro Plan

As you have seen, most of the advanced features for corporate users and brands are paid. Especially the Social Filters are worth a mint. If you are in need to get to know your customers better, which every company should, consider subscribing to one of the two paid plans available. Start with Pro and upgrade when and if needed.

Instead of committing yourself to the annual payment of 228 dollars you might as well first try your luck, as we teamed up with Opinion Stage to give away two annual Pro Plans for free. Participating is easy. Simply leave a comment below this article, detailing why you'd be the best winner to be drawn. Make sure to add a valid email address, otherwise we wouldn't be able to reach you in case you win.

The raffle runs internationally with no restrictions. It starts immediately and ends on the 7th of February 2014 at 6:00 PM CEST. Good luck!

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Dieter Petereit

Dieter Petereit is a veteran of the web with over 25 years of experience in the world of IT. As soon as Netscape became available he started to do what already at that time was called web design and has carried on ever since. Two decades ago he started writing for several online publications, some well, some lesser known. You can meet him over on Google+.

8 comments

  1. I have a new company in a very tight budget… very tight. lol This woul help me understand the customers way better. thanks!

  2. Hello,
    I would like to win because I start an E-Shop this year and it would be a great help for me to understand my customers!

  3. I really have to win because I would have “something to put on my website” then ;)
    By the way: Is it already Central European SUMMER Time (as 6PM CEST suggests) over there?

  4. Hi there,

    I never heard about this tool before but after reading the review it really looks awesome.

    I am doing free consulting to couple of non profit organizations here in Costa Rica and the free account would allow me to reach and engage more people thus bring more exposure to these organization.

    Hope I wins :)

    Sourav

  5. Probably it’s a good tool for polls, but there are a lot of limitations like: you have to sign up for an account to create a poll, you can’t fully customize the layout, you can’t have different types of answers (checklist, radio button, scale, etc.), you can’t manage the poll from your WordPress admin, even if you install the plugin and more. It turned out that for us Google Drive is a better solution, see our survey here: http://teslathemes.com/blog/complete-our-survey-and-win-a-developer-subscription/. We’re not sure that Opinion Stage could reproduce the same type of survey.

  6. While Polldaddy might have the larger feature set over all, Opinion Stage sure serves its niche better! I’m in!

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