LinkedIn the official business networking tool has been making changes to increase engagement across the groups on LinkedIn. With a continuously growing number of businesses looking to increase their LinkedIn presence and engage in conversations with their target audiences, many are using LinkedIn groups, to create and manage groups focused on different business-related topics. The one problem that users faced on LinkedIn as compared to other Social Networks was that the response time to any discussion was slow. This is all about to change; LinkedIn has introduced a feature of polls for groups to increase the pace on discussions.

In this new feature LinkedIn is allowing users to create polls for groups. If you are a group manager or a member within a group then you can create a poll with five questions. As of now this feature is available for groups and not for company pages. If you have not seen this feature yet then you are going to see a lot of them pretty soon. To make sure that this feature is a hit LinkedIn has added the like, comment on and follow polls button. Creating a poll in LinkedIn groups is very simple and easy. As of now anyone in a group can create a poll but this can be changed by the administrator of the group, allowing only moderators to set up the poll. As I said earlier this feature is currently not available for company pages, but still we recommend certain ways by which brands can benefit by running polls. Here we list out a few ways by which brands can benefit by running LinkedIn polls.

• LinkedIn polls can be used to create blog content; getting knowledge of what the audience wants to read is always helpful as this can help you drive more traffic towards your website.
• Before launching a new product what every brand wants to know is whether the market is ready for it or not and what the audience really thinks of it. Polls could be really helpful here they can act as focus group for you and let you know what people are thinking.
• Cross marketing across other social platforms is possible by running polls. For example you can use Twitter to let your followers know about the poll that you are running on LinkedIn and can expand your fan base on LinkedIn also.

These are just few tips on how you can use polls on LinkedIn to increase engagement across your community.