Surveys & Survey Tools

Surveys are an excellent way to gain data for situations pertinent to you. Surveys can be a fairly non-intrusive way to gain information from your target audience and get active feedback. Surveys have been around for a very long time. They have evolved from people in public areas with clipboards to telemarketing surveys to the popularity and relative anonymity of the internet.

Create your Own Surveys and Polls:

When creating your own surveys you should plan ahead. You are trying to achieve results.

1. Make sure you have a goal from your Survey. This information you’re gathering has to have a purpose. People do not have unlimited patience. The days of telephone surveys have sort of ruined people towards surveys. You will get responses, but if you are putting up constant surveys you will stop getting accurate responses.
2. Order your questions correctly. You need to make sure that if some of your questions depend on answers to previous questions they follow those up. Your questions require a logical order to keep the reader involved.
3. Keep your surveys to manageable lengths. No one wants to spend an hour filling out a survey. People will quit mid survey and you will not gain any benefit from the survey.
4. Write in answers are the enemy. If you list an option as “other” with write in boxes, you better make sure that’s exactly what you want. It’s better to keep your questions closed ended. This ensures people retain their focus on the question and moving along to the next question.
5. Simplicity is an art form. Keep the questions in your survey simple. Try to avoid industry jargon or using acronyms. While you may understand every acronym you’re using, not everyone will have the same knowledge base to work off of.
6. If you’re using a ratings system, don’t start changing it. If you’re using a 1 to 5 scale, then don’t suddenly change to a 1 to 3 for a different question or a 1 to 7 for another. Keep things consistent.

Survey Tools:

There are a lot of survey tools you can use to help assist you with creating your own surveys and polls. We shall take a look at some of them. The key with these survey tools it to make sure that they work with the media you are trying to be a part of and they provide you the information in a way that you wish to receive it. Almost every survey provides information in the “comma separated values” or CSV format. But it’s good to know which other formats you can receive them in.

• SurveyMonkey: SurveyMonkey is an excellent tool when you want to create your surveys on Facebook. It specializes in that specific social media. SurveyMonkey will also give you multiple ways to gain your data like excel or google spreadsheets.
• ZoHo Survey : ZoHo Survey is a basic survey program that keeps things simple.
• FluidSurveys: FluidSurveys is a social media giant. It can be used on essentially every single social media platform. If you’re looking to keep your company very active on social media then this is the one for you. FluidSurveys usually is best used by large businesses or enterprises rather than small businesses looking to make a moderate amount of impact.