If you’ve got a decision to make, you now have a new way to poll the hive mind: through Instagram. In the photo-sharing app’s latest update, you can now add a polling sticker to your Instagram Stories. It’s a great way to gauge sentiment on a quick yes-or-no question—as long as your friends and followers watch your Stories.
To use the new sticker, make sure your app is updated (the feature is available on both Android and iOS versions). Then just swipe over to the right to access your Stories. Take your photo or video, as you normally would, and then tap to proceed to the editing screen. Select the stickers icon along the top. There among the first few rows of options (next to the #Hashtag sticker) should be a new Poll sticker.
Tap that sticker and it will be placed on your Story. You can then tap out a question, which defaults with Yes or No as the two choices viewers can opt between. If you tap the Yes or No field, however, you can also customize what those responses say. At the current time, polls appear to be limited to only two response options. Like any sticker, you can drag it around to get its positioning just right over your image.
Once you’ve posted your Story, viewers will be able to tap and vote. If you want to see how people voted, open the viewers list for that particular Story. There you’ll see a list of who voted, the vote standings, and who voted for which option, along with how many total views it’s gotten.
In today’s update, Instagram made a few other changes, too. Now you can use an eyedropper tool to select a color from your image to use for paintbrushes or text. On iOS, Instagram also added an alignment tool, in case you want to make sure text or stickers are perfectly centered across your Stories.
While the new polling sticker will be fun for us average Instagram users, it will be interesting to see how brands and retailers start incorporating it, too. Perhaps they’ll poll followers when they have to make a choice between two color or flavor variants. Perhaps, we won’t even realized we’re responding to a sponsored story until we’ve already responded to the poll. First though, I’ll just use it so you guys can help me decide which flavor of macaroni and cheese to eat for dinner tonight.
H/T The Verge
