How I created Facebook live poll in 3 min (a story of tech outsider)

A growing trend of live content is not a hypothesis any more. We all see how it went viral. Sharing pictures of how you are spending vacation on Bora Bora will not surprise anybody (“But it’s Bora Bora!” you will say), while doing live streams of your holiday activities gonna make your friends and followers express their rapture (and die of jealousy, of course) with likes, comments and shares.

God bless Facebook, cause they made it possible to engage your audience even more by creation of interactive Facebook live polls. You might have noticed that this tool works pretty good. But why? The reason is simple. People LOVE to let others know what they think and express their opinion on every single point around. “Red is not your color… This dress not really suits you...”, “You’ve been married for 5 years already, why not to start thinking about kids?”, “I swear, this dress is black & blue, not golden & white!”, “I’ll vote for Johnny Depp on next elections, at least he’s hot”... Sounds familiar, right? That’s actually why not only Facebook live polls are so viral, but social networks in general as well.

If you ended up reading this blog post, it means that you’ve already tried to make something similar but almost give up after getting lost in all this tutorials, programming, codes and special software. Here is simple solution how to make a Facebook live poll video in 5 minutes (approved by my personal experience).

I want to share with you one big secret - when it comes to dealing with technologies, I’m complete outsider. To make sure I succeed with creating something technological, tools I work with need to be as much easy-to-use as possible. So here is my story. I’m a cat lover. No words in the world are enough to express how I adore these cute fluffy creatures. However, my second most adorable creature - my boyfriend (please, don’t tell him he’s second) - has terrible allergy on cats, first of all, and, secondly, turns out to be a desperate dog-lover. Hours of discussions and arguing were summed up with decision to start a contest - cats aka dogs. To ensure results are objective and independent, we decided to collect opinions through Facebook live poll (hello, digital era) on my personal page.

So the massive task appeared. Now I realize it hardly can be called a task, not even a massive task, cause all the process took 3 minutes of my priceless personal time. Here are all steps I passed as a confirmation.

Step #1: Sign up with Facebook in 1 click.

Go to LiveReacting. Click sign up. Easy as hell. And I’m on my personal dashboard page.

Step #2: Choose the template and page to post.

I selected first one “Voting by reactions” with two options to vote. Then it offers to choose where to post. In my case - personal profile.

Step #3: Put your content.

On this step, I wrote necessary text and browsed pictures I need. Here is title, cat and dog pics and my background I wanted to put.

Note: Don’t focus on pictures’ size, it shapes automatically!

Some nice music and options of reactions to vote (“love” - for cats; “like” - for dogs).

Step #4: Preview and post!

Here how my poll looks like.

Nice, isn’t it? I was satisfied with result so I clicked “Create a post”. One post can cost you few dollars, depending on how many posts you need. Here is also an option to make a test post for free to check how it’ll work for you. For more information about pricing check the website.

Broadcasting is active for 4 hours due to Facebook internal regulations. After 4 hours on my page it looked like this:

I don’t really have engaging posts on my personal page, especially live streaming content. With around 900 friends and followers after 4 hours of experiment, the result, as you can see, is the following:

• 528 views;
• 128 reactions;
• 29 for cats against 99 for dogs;
• 1 happy boyfriend.

I lost. I’m sad and disappointed. Never expected most of my friends to be dog lovers! But what’s good about this experiment, I proved that Facebook live polls can be created just in 3 minutes.

Try it on! Hope you’ll be more lucky than me :)

Create Facebook Live Video right now

P.S. More insights about how Facebook live polls work for business purposes are coming soon. Stay tuned.