Audience: Creators Status: User Guide
Live polls are a quick way to involve your audience during a stream. You ask a question, your viewers vote, and the tallies update in real time for everyone watching. This guide covers creating a poll, choosing how voting works, reading the results, and closing the poll.
Who can run polls
You can run polls on your own live episodes. Beyond you as the creator, your organization’s operators can also create and close polls. The same people who moderate your live chat can manage your polls.
Creating a poll
From the live controls for your episode, start a new poll. A poll needs:
- A question.
- At least two options. Blank options are ignored, so you need two or more options with text.
Pick the voting mode when you create the poll, then start it. Once it is open, viewers see it on the live episode and can begin voting right away.
Free or coin-weighted
You choose one of two modes per poll.
Free
Each viewer gets one vote. By default a viewer cannot change their vote after casting it. If you would rather let people change their mind, enable the option to allow re-voting when you create the poll.
Coin-weighted
Viewers spend coins to add weight to their vote. You set the coins per vote, which must be a positive number. In a coin-weighted poll a viewer can cast more than once to add more weight. Coins spent on a poll count toward your earnings as the creator. Coins are a paid currency your viewers buy, so use this mode when you want a weighted result rather than a simple head count.
Watching results
While the poll is open, results update live. As votes come in, the tallies refresh for you and for everyone watching, with no need to reload. For a coin-weighted poll you can see both the vote count and the total coins for each option, so you can tell how strongly people feel, not just how many voted.
Closing a poll
When you are done, close the poll. Closing stops further voting and shows the final results. Only one poll is active on an episode at a time, so close the current poll before starting another. Closing is limited to you and your operators, the same people who can create polls.
Tips for good polls
- Keep questions short and the options clear so viewers can vote at a glance.
- Use Free for a quick pulse of the room, and Coin-weighted when you want viewers to be able to back a choice more strongly.
- If you want a free poll where people can react to the conversation as it changes, turn on re-voting.