Designated planners of the group WhatsApp chat, this one is: getting your social events in the calendar just got a whole lot easier thanks to the app’s latest feature.
Polls have officially landed, which means instead of circular conversations where potential dates are thrown around at random, never agreed upon, forgotten about and relaunched into the ether at irregular intervals, you can all agree on a suitable time and day, as well as meeting place, activity and a whole plethora of other organisational tidbits in one visually effective place.
Other apps which do essentially the same thing already exist, but corralling your mates to actually download and use them is just one admin job too many – everyone’s already got WhatsApp installed, and this new feature is going to get a LOT of usage.
How do I put polls on WhatsApp?
To find polls in your app, simply open the ‘+’ sign next to your text box and scroll down to ‘Polls’ – from there, just like when you add one to your Instagram stories, you can type out a question and as many possible answers as your heart desires.
It’s part of a wider update focused on communities, which also includes the new ability to group together related group chats and increasing group chat capacity to a 1,024 members.
On its official blog, WhatsApp says, ‘Communities like neighborhoods, parents at a school, and workplaces can now connect multiple groups together under one umbrella to organize group conversations on WhatsApp.
‘With Communities, we’re aiming to raise the bar for how organizations communicate with a level of privacy and security not found anywhere else. The alternatives available today require trusting apps or software companies with a copy of their messages - and we think they deserve the higher level of security provided by end-to-end encryption.’
‘Today we’re also releasing three more features we think users will be excited about: the ability to create in-chat polls, 32 person video calling, and groups with up to 1024 users. Just like emoji reactions, larger file sharing, and admin delete, these features can be used in any group but will be particularly helpful for Communities.’