When it comes to helping companies achieve business goals, many of the popular social networks have released features this year to assist in that endeavor.

LinkedIn recently contributed to this with the release of a Poll feature inside of Groups.

LinkedIn Groups typically consist of a decent amount of folks that are fairly engaged. Thus, the Poll feature could absolutely be used to help a company in a number of areas. For example, a LinkedIn poll may help you:

• Conduct market research on technology and trends
• Gauge interest in the new products, services, or enhancements
• Gather feedback on how the company is being perceived among its customers

How to Set up a Poll within a Group

This part is very easy! Head over to your Group, to the main page where you would typically start a Discussion. There, you’ll see the new option for starting a Poll.

From that screen, you can quickly enter your Question and the possible Answers.

Poll Reporting

LinkedIn does a nice job of presenting the overall results inside of the Group.

I recently launched a Poll in the interlinkONE User Group on LinkedIn to see if our customers will be attending Drupa in May of 2012.  Here’s a screenshot:

With all of the demographic data inside of LinkedIn, it certainly would be nice to be able to see a deeper breakdown of what types of people are selecting each answer. While you can do that via the Polls that you launch under your personal profile, I have not yet seen how to do that with the Polls that are launched in Groups.

However, even if that does not truly exist right now (I may just be over-looking it), I wouldn’t be surprised if Linkedin rolls out an enhancement to support that sooner than later.

Photo Credit

Tags: feature, feedback, groups, Linkedin, market research, Social Media, social networks, surveys, users