If you are a news and media publisher, nothing beats having access to a solid poll plugin to boost audience engagement. After all, an engaged audience is a loyal audience.
Polls plugins for news and media publishers are a great option to interact with readers and gather crucial insights. No matter if you’re an entertainment publisher, a financial news site, or a sports media outlet- try integrating polls into your content to experience better engagement, instant feedback, and watch your content becoming more interactive.
And the best part? it’s not just for the big players! Even smaller publishers and bloggers can hugely benefit from using polls to build a loyal and engaged following.
Why Every News and Media Publisher Should Use Poll Plugins
Makes your content interactive
Polls make your content interactive and lets readers participate in the process.
For example, a news site can use a poll to ask readers their opinions on current events and happenings and thus turning passive readers into active participants.
Increased time on site
When readers engage with a poll, they spend more time on your website.
Imagine a sports website running a poll about the predictions for an upcoming game. It will prompt the reader to stay longer to see the results and engage in related discussions. It also helps grow the community which is beneficial to the publisher in the long run.
Community building activity
Polls create a sense of community by involving your audience in discussions. Many entertainment sites use polls to let readers vote on their favorite movies or OTT shows and create a shared experience among fans in the process. Top lists can also be sourced from these polls giving publishers a good insight into what their audience likes and dislikes.
Content ideas
Poll results inspire new content ideas. If you are a financial news site, you can run a poll on the most debated economic issues and the result can guide your future articles. You can understand your audience’s stand and create more topics accordingly to serve that.
Understand audience sentiment
Poll results offer key insights into your audience’s opinions and feelings, which can be used for promoting content on social media.
Suppose, you are a lifestyle blogger, you can use poll data to tailor your social media posts, knowing exactly what your readers are most vocal about.
Polls can be monetized
Have you thought about monetizing polls through sponsorships or ads?
A tech blog can look for partnering with a gadget company to create sponsored polls about the latest tech trends, earning additional revenue.This can turn out to be beneficial for both the advertisers by giving them target audience insights and the publisher.
SEO benefits
Polls act as highly engaging content to improve SEO. They help in creating highly engaged pages with low bounce rates and shareable content.
Also, polls are easily shareable on social media, driving more traffic to your site.
Best Poll Plugins on WordPress for News and Media Publishers
Now that we’ve covered some of the benefits of a poll plugin for news and media publishers, here’s a list of some of the best poll plugins available.
WP Forms
WPForm is the most popular poll plugin on WordPress, with over 6,000,000 active installations and includes 1800+ pre-built templates to help news and media publishers get started quickly. The drag-and-drop builder allows you to easily design polls/forms of your choice.
WP Forms also lets you add smart fields like Likert scales, multiple-choice questions, and star ratings. Add images too if you want, to make your poll more exciting. You can display real-time poll results on your website and view results from the WordPress dashboard in easy-to-read report formats such as pie charts, bar graphs, and more.
The basic plan of WP Forms starts at $49.50/year for 1 Site and $99.50/year for up to 3 Sites.
Opinion Stage
Using Opinion Stage, news and media publishers can create polls from scratch, from a template, or with AI. You can also customize your polls based on your use case. All it takes is a minute to get started.
You can even track results and optimize for maximum conversions. Opinion Stage has a user-friendly built-in system that allows you to get better responses.
It is a great tool if you are looking at quizzes and polls to improve content engagement, social sharing, and time on site. It also offers an intuitive analytics dashboard to analyze results easily.
Opinion Stage offers a free plan for a single user with 25 responses each month. The business plan is $79 per month and includes 10,000 responses each month and 3 users.
YOP Poll
YOP Poll is a free WordPress plugin that allows news and media publishers to create online polls and surveys on their websites.
Using YOP Poll, you can schedule polls, display polls on multiple pages, showcase poll results in numbers and percentages, and reset polls at any given time. It also allows you to limit the poll to guest/registered users.
The YOP poll can present results in a variety of forms. The archive option displays previous poll results, sorted by poll start and end dates.
Formidable Forms
Formidable Forms is a powerful tool for creating surveys and polls on WordPress. It offers a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface to build your polls in no time.
Some of the key features of Formidable Forms include:
- Visual poll styler to personalize your poll’s look.
- You can create multi-page surveys, add progress bars, include images, and more.
- Formidable Forms comes with smart question branching (conditional logic), review before submitting, and detailed reports and graphs.
With over 400,000+ active installations, Formidable Forms is a great choice for creating effective, solution-focused forms.
This plugin is free but offers additional paid commercial upgrades or support.
Total Poll Pro
TotalPoll Pro makes creating and integrating polls easy for news and media publishers. Its plethora of features and options give you full control over your polls.
Total Poll Pro is equipped with one-click updates and a user-friendly interface with a mobile-first approach. You can create unlimited polls with customizable designs, colors, layouts, and fonts.
The plugin also supports custom fields like text, checkboxes with customizable CSS classes and validations.
Regular License for Total Poll Pro is priced at $79
WP-Polls
With over 60,000 active installations, WP-Polls is an easy and free solution for adding polls to your WordPress site.
You can place polls on your pages, posts, and on widget areas effortlessly. Users can select multiple choices in a poll, and results are shown automatically after selections are made.
If you know some coding, you can customize the look of your poll by changing the theme and adding custom CSS.
Poll Maker
Poll Maker offers impressive tools for building simple polls. You’ll have 5 poll types to choose from, advanced settings, dozens of style options, 7 pre-build themes, and many more functionalities.
There is a default WordPress classic editor for editing the question. Most importantly, it allows you to create an image poll, video poll, or audio poll. If you have CSS or HTML skills, you are free to write your own code.
Poll Makes is a free WordPress plugin but offers additional paid commercial upgrades or support.
If you are a news and media publisher looking to boost reader engagement, we strongly recommend you to check out our Publisher Centric Tools at iZooto.
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