Google+ hack – how to embed a poll in your stream

Missing features on Google+

Google’s social network, Google+ is young and they are rolling features out one by one, but a major feature that users want but the site has not yet offered is a polling mechanism. Businesses often poll their social networks to discover trends, to get feedback, or simply to start conversation, but continue to rely on Facebook for polling. It doesn’t have to be that way.

To hack your way into being a regular pollster on Google+, just postt a new status update, “Please vote on [something] by adding a +1.” Then, quickly comment with the options, “Option one” is it’s own comment, “Option two” is a separate comment to the update and so on. Then it’s time to hack it into a poll so people don’t come distort results by adding options or commenting – go to the top right of the original status update and click the little grey triangle and out of the options select “Disable comments.” Voila! You’re a pollster!

Bonus step:

If you want to share the poll on your other social networks, click the time stamp on the original status update and it will take you to the exact URL where your new poll is:


If you’d like to see a poll in action, click here for the ridiculous sample poll we posted on Google+. As of publication, there was one vote. For beer. Go figure.