Facebook Messenger is adding a new feature to its Messenger app that might help during those times you’re feeling particularly indecisive. With Polls, users can now post questions to their Stories for their friends to vote on.
While Polls are likely associated as a feature on Instagram, it isn’t completely new to the Messenger platform. For a while now, users have been able to create in-chat polls between group chats among friends. But since your Story on Messenger is also shared on Facebook, you’re able to open up your questions to even more of your Facebook friends — you know, in case you need more feedback than what an intimate group can provide.
To post a Poll to your Messenger Story, all you need to do is take a photo or video and select the “polls” sticker from the stickers icon. Once you have placed it over your content, you can then type your question and customize the answers for your viewers to choose between. After posting it, your followers on Messenger can then start voting and are also able to see the results in real time.
If you want to see the results yourself, you can access them through your Story by swiping up to see the viewers list to see how many votes each answer received. The voting process isn’t anonymous either — the viewers list will show you who specifically voted for each answer. Those who view your Story can also reply to it by typing their response at the bottom which will then open the conversation in Messenger.
Within recent months, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed that Stories would be a focus for the company. Starting a few weeks ago, Facebook began rolling out a variety of updates to Stories in order to give its users more ways to enhance them.
For starters, users will be able to add audio to their Stories — which can be useful for sharing content that isn’t as visual. Another feature (that is also already available on Instagram) is the ability to archive their Stories. Since Stories are only visible for 24 hours, the archive feature allows you to refer back to it later. Lastly, the update will also give users the ability to save storage on their smartphones by saving images from the Facebook Camera to a private Facebook cloud storage.
As for the Facebook Messenger feature, it’s currently rolling out to both iOS and Android. You also have to make sure you’re using the latest version of the app.
