It’s been a while since YouTube rolled out its Cards feature — the mobile-friendly evolution of annotations — which has proved to be a powerful tool to increase engagement and click-through rates. In the past, you could choose between four types of cards: Video or Playlist, Channel, Donation and Link (which includes both Merch and Associated Website) — check out this Daily Rind post for more info — and now, Poll cards have been added to that list.
This new type of card allows you to make your videos even more interactive by letting viewers participate in a multiple-choice poll. You can define your poll’s title and up to five poll choices, and the best part is that you can see the results in real time! As with other card types, you can have the poll card show at a specific time in the video and see how it is performing through your channel’s analytics:
We have some early performance results, too: a poll card got a 7% of clicks per teaser shown and 145% of clicks per card shown. Considering that the average for other card types is 1% and 10% respectively, these are great results. It’s a fantastic way to encourage viewers to engage with your content while giving you valuable insight as well. For example: don’t know which music video you are going to publish next? Let your fans tell you!
To make it easy, here’s how to create a poll in your videos:
- Go to your Video Manager
- For the video you want to add a poll to, click Edit
- In the top tab bar, click Cards
- Click Add card
- Next to the Poll option, click Create
- Add your poll’s title end up to five poll choices
- Create the card and adjust the start time for the card teaser in the timeline under the video
- Click Create Card
The only requirements are that viewers must be logged into YouTube to be able to vote, and on mobile devices, they must be using the YouTube app for both Android (version 10.34 and up) and iOS (version 10.33 and up).
