Last week I pushed up a quick Facebook poll asking about how people would plan a trip to somewhere new.
Sadly I kind of mucked up the questions. What I was trying to find out was how many people would go to Google versus go to either a travel vertical or a site like Flickr or Youtube. The question was targeted at Facebook members based in London - here's a screengrab of the results:
So what went wrong?
The great thing about Facebook Polls is that you can see the data coming in in pretty much real time. So after 15 minutes, I could see that the results were going to be massively skewed towards Google.
But that isn't the whole picture - for example, content on TripAdvisor is pretty well indexed on Google, so you might start a search on Google, but finish on tripAdvisor.
It would have been nice to have been able to ask 'which of the following would you use' and allow for multiple selections, but Facebook won't allow for that.
On the positive side, because I could see that the real-time poll results weren't giving me what I wanted, I could kill the poll after just 30 responses - costing me a very reasonable $8!
And actually, bearing in mind the pathetically small sample, it does look like a very small minority of people would actually turn to TripAdvisor or YouTube before doing a search - so I think there is the germ of something interesting here.
Final take-out: if you have a simple question that needs researching, a Facebook poll might have some value - if only to spot problems with your question set!
Leave a comment