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Why poll results on most blogs are skewed?

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Have you ever wondered why poll results on your blog come up overwhelmingly supportive of what you do? This is especially true when your own opinion precedes the poll. e.g. I think this way, how about you? And the results would be in your favor. Why is that?

• Why your readers respond in the way that you want them to respond?
• Does this skew the accuracy of the polls?
• And if it does how the polls should be conducted?

This post will tackle all the above questions.

Readers supporting the author

Here is an example from my own blog, this was the time when I used to write short posts, I asked my readers if they wanted to read short posts or longer posts. I did mention my own preference in the post, which was “writing short posts”. Since the readers read the post first, they did know my preference. So, the answer was of course “write short posts (66.67%)”.

But writing short posts for more than a year didn’t make this blog successful, the success came when I started writing longer posts. If I had followed the poll results, AdesBlog wouldn’t be where it is now. RSS readers would be 50+ instead of 500+.

So why readers support the blogger?

One of the reasons, why your readers are reading your blog in the first place is that, they find your blog interesting. They like what you write, and agree with you on many grounds. At least the majority of your readers do.

And the ones who do not agree, are actually not your core readers. Usually these people do not follow your blog regularly. They just pop in to make some comments and leave. These people eventually stop reading your blog altogether.

So the regular readers of your blog, are people that have similar mindset, similar thinking with you. And it is only natural for these people to support their fellow blogger in his/her endeavor. They are the ones who will tell you to keep going and show support. And that is actually something nice.

But when it comes to polls, this same support can actually give you wrong perception (which can result in unfavorable outcome for you in the future). And that leads us to next question.

Does this (the support of the readers) skew the accuracy of the polls?

Depending on how the poll is conducted, it does. For example, if you let your readers know about your own preference before the poll, then it skews the results.

Like in my case, I did say I want to post short posts, and the poll results reflected my preference.

How the polls should be conducted?

Polls should be conducted in a neutral ground. Of course it depends on you, what you really want to get from the poll results. If you are looking for support to back you up on something, then promoting your own thoughts first (before the poll) wouldn’t be a bad idea after all.

But, if you truly want to know your readers opinion on certain issues, it’s important that you do not reveal your own opinion beforehand. This would eliminate the bias voting that results from readers’ subconscious support towards you that we talked in the first part of this post. And the results that you will get will be the true results!

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