The age of engagement and how to conduct your customer feedback/polls

We have so many social platforms at our disposal and businesses are becoming increasingly driven by their customers. The ones that still do the driving have number days because brand loyalty is as fickle as a hook up at a swinger's party. So you have to continually have honest conversations with your consumers and engage in "Relationship Marketing".

What better way to do this with a Facebook Question on your Facebook page? I thought this until I used it for the first time last week. I posted a Facebook Question and had eight simple multiple choice options. The problem is that Facebook Questions has a terrible design. It only displays the first three answer options and hides the other answer options behind an inconspicuous "5 More..." link at the bottom.

But it gets worse; once you click on "More" you then get a pop up window which still doesn't show you all the answer options and still has the same "Show More" link for the other answer options.

Inaccurate results

Only after clicking this "More" link the second time will you see all the answer options? I found this greatly affected my answer results. Answer options hidden by the more link simply did not get seen. To validate my suspicions I decided to research other Facebook Questions and see what their results were. I found the same thing in around 90% of the questions I looked at. All of them had a significant drop of in votes for answer options below the more link. Browsers simply chose from the initial visible options.

To me this very simply design feature hugely undermines the effectiveness of Facebook Questions. The results you get are flawed. So if you just want to superficially bother your bored Facebook fans, by all means post a Facebook Question but if you want to gather honest feedback, don't use Facebook Questions. The results you get will be meaningless. So until Facebook can fix this simply design problem, make sure you only stick to three answer options - at least then you won't have any options hidden by the nasty more link.

I suggest using something like Survey Monkey. Sure there is a little extra work to plug it into your social platforms but you can share it on Facebook, Twitter, embed it into a webpage or simply mail it out to your customers. At least you will gather meaningful data.

In this age of social media and shared opinion, it is imperative to build a human relationship with your customers. All these social platforms are not a replacement or different way of communicating. They are simply an additional way of communicating. In the end we all want to be spoken to as individuals and want to be heard. So use trial and error to find the best way for you to communicate with your customers.