In case you haven’t heard, LinkedIn has put a cool feature in place:  the ability to poll LinkedIn users.  They’ve created an app–basically, a poll widget–that you can add to your account.  You can then use it to gather data from LinkedIn users.

Here are some things to know if you’re considering using this:

It’s not necessarily a “free lunch.”  Unless you’re a premium subscriber, the polls are free ONLY if you’re polling the “first degree connnections” in your network.

That might be OK if you just want some quick opinions from people you know.

• Remember, though, that you’re hearing from a VERY select group.
• Know that the people who are your “first degree connections” are more likely to be like you, in key demographic characteristics, than other people you’re connected to or other people on LinkedIn.
• So don’t count on doing a lot with these data.  If you want some impressions about your target market, and your target market is like you demographically, you might get some useful impressions that you could feed into “real” surveys.

Your other option is to pay to poll a broader audience of LinkedIn users.  The minimum price for this is $50.  And if you go this way, you’ve got some decisions to make about how to proceed:

• The cost of the poll depends upon the number of responses.  You can set the number and see what the final price will be, when you use the “targeted preview” feature.
• You have the ability to “cut” the sample in several different ways, by targeting LinkedIn members with certain characteristics.  Each “cut” increases the cost of your poll.  So if you select on company size or seniority, you increase the cost by $1 per response; selecting on gender, age, or geography increases cost by $.50 per characteristic.
• That means you could, for example, poll women between 35 and 50 with a given level of seniority in certain job functions.
• Remember, though, it’s still a VERY selected sample, because you’re ONLY reaching members of LinkedIn who see your poll and respond.

What can you do with the data?

You can get some general impressions about your target market that you could “feed” into social media.

You could use the information to do some quick articles, AS LONG as you acknowledge that the information is based on a very select sample–LinkedIn members.

You can take these impressions of your target market and use them to write a better survey that you’ll then give to a more systematic sample of your target market.

These polls can be fun.

You can use the results to create some excitement on your blog or in social media.

But remember, these polls AREN’T “scientific,” because they ONLY tell you about people who are using LikedIn and who chose to respond to your poll.

That means that all you can do is describe the sample–period.  You can’t assume that these results represent your target market.

Have a question?  Post a comment and we’ll get an answer up, right away!