Done right, live polling can shoot engagement during your Zoom calls through the roof. And who wouldn’t wish for more engaging meetings and webinars, right?
In an online space, polls are your ultimate helpers: They help you communicate with your online audience and smoothly collect their opinions and instant feedback.
Just ask your audience a poll question and let them vote in real time.
You’ll keep your online participants engaged throughout your Zoom call and collect plenty of great insights!
Read on to find out everything you need to know about live polling in Zoom.
How can you poll your audience on Zoom?
There are two main ways you can do live polling in Zoom.
You can either use:
- Zoom’s built-in polling feature
- Or a separate polling app on top of Zoom’s solution
Here’s an overview of both solutions:
Zoom’s polling feature
Zoom offers a basic polling solution for both their Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars platform, which allows you to create either single or multiple choice polls.
You simply create a poll question, give your virtual participants a set of multiple options they can choose from, and allow them to vote for either one of the options (single choice) or select multiple options of their choice (multiple choice).
You can either launch one poll at a time or run multiple polls in one go, survey-style.
After your participants have voted, you simply end the poll and – if you want to – share the results with your audience.
Live polling app
The second way to engage your online audience with polls is by using a dedicated live polling app, such as Slido.
Compared to the built-in solution in Zoom, a polling app offers you more options for engaging your online audience.
You can run different sorts of polls:
Besides single and multiple choice polls, your online participants can send their rating in rating polls and create beautiful word clouds with word cloud polls. Let them write down their own thoughts in open text polls, or lift their spirits with a quiz.
Running polls on Zoom through a polling app like Slido is super easy – you just open Slido in fullscreen and share your screen for your online participants to see the poll results.
The best thing is that if you also have a presentation deck on either Google Slides or PowerPoint, you can integrate Slido directly into your slides and engage your online audience as you present!
Find more info in these two guides on How to use Slido with Zoom Meetings and How to use Slido with Zoom Webinar.
Zoom’s built-in polling solution vs Live polling app: Who wins?
Now that we’ve briefly reviewed the two polling solutions – Zoom’s built-in polling feature and a polling app – how do you decide which one’s right for you?
That’s the best part: You don’t need to choose one or the other.
In their ebook, Zoom actually recommends using Slido to boost interactivity during Zoom events/meetings in addition to their built-in Q&A and polling features.
While Zoom’s basic polling function may serve you very well during some types of meetings or events, for other Zoom meetings, you might need a more complex polling solution.
Here are 5 main perks of using Slido on top of Zoom’s polling feature:
#1: Leverage the full power of polls
There are many types of polls out there, besides just single choice and multiple choice, that you can use in an endless number of ways, enabling you to squeeze out as many priceless insights from your virtual audience as possible. Plus, they look awesome on screen.
Word clouds are great icebreakers: Your audience members simply submit words, which you can then display as a cool-looking word collage:
Rating polls and open text polls will help you re-engage your virtual audience throughout your online meeting/event. Ask your participants to rate how they understand the presented topic so far, and encourage them to jot down their thoughts, or collect instant feedback through surveys.
You can also quiz your audience and tap into your participants’ competitive spirit. Let’s explore this a bit more in the next point.
Read also: 40+ Best Poll Questions to Engage Your Online Audience
#2: Create a rich quiz experience for your audience
Take polls even further and kick off your virtual meeting or event with an interactive quiz. In Slido, you can create a full quiz experience for your online audience – with a timer, correct answers, and a leaderboard!
You can run a quiz just for fun – the possibilities are endless there – or leverage the power of quizzes in more creative ways.
For example, at an all-hands meeting, present your company stats as a quiz for a change and let your employees guess how your company did last month/quarter.
Or, you can use a quiz to introduce your newbies – just collect fun details about your new colleagues and let the rest of the team guess away. If you’re in need of inspiration, you can browse through our templates library or check out one of these 4 awesome quiz ideas.
Read also: Step-by-Step Guide for Hosting a Great Online Pub Quiz
#3: Engage everyone, on and off the call
Using Zoom’s polling feature means that only those people who are directly present on the Zoom call can participate in polls. This excludes people in a hybrid setup.
If multiple people are joined on one call, Zoom’s built-in features fall a bit short – you cannot include everyone.
With a polling app, you can engage everyone in the conversation through polls, quizzes, or surveys, whether they are behind their laptops or not – they simply vote through their devices.
You can even engage people before your Zoom call even starts. Send your online participants a link to a survey or a poll, and ask them to fill it out. At your Zoom meeting, you can then reveal the results.
Read also: 27 Tips For Running Successful Remote Meetings
#4: Marry polls with your slides and present seamlessly
When polling through the Zoom feature, you interrupt the flow by having to run a poll away from your presentation deck – in a window that pops out on your participant’s screen.
With Slido’s Google Slides add-on, Microsoft Teams add-on, and PowerPoint add-on, everything happens in one place.
You can integrate your polls directly into your presentation flow, and once on a Zoom call, share your screen and run all the interactions with your audience seamlessly as you move through your slides.
#5: Use one tool, explore many options
Using a separate polling app gives you ultimate independence from any video conferencing platform: You can use Slido on Zoom today, on Microsoft Teams tomorrow, and Google Meet the next week – using a single tool.
This way, you can get used to one engagement app, prepare your polls, surveys, and quizzes there, and use it on whichever video conferencing platform you want, in whichever setup.
What’s more, Slido offers you a complex audience engagement – from polls, quizzes, and surveys, to live Q&A, through which you can collect questions from your online audience.
Read also: All You Need To Know for Running a Great Q&A Session on Zoom
Over to you
We hope this article has told you all you needed to know about live polling on Zoom, and that you’re now ready to take engagement during your Zoom meetings and events up to the next level.
If you have questions or need any help in finding the best solution for you, just contact us or schedule a demo with our team below.
We’ll be happy to guide you through everything to do with live polling!
