Who doesn’t love a trivia challenge or a flash poll on a hot-button issue? According to Social Media Today's survey of 2016 content marketing trends, consumers love to engage with quizzes, games, and polls. In fact, quizzes and polls were the most-shared content type on Facebook in 2015.
Over the past year, the Bing team has launched several new experiences designed to deliver on our promise to delight and surprise while providing opportunities to learn. In late May, we made one of the more signficant changes to our homepage since Bing launched in 2009, by transforming homepage hotspots into homepage trivia.
Now when you visit Bing.com, you’ll see a graduation cap icon. Hover over it, and the first question about the image of the day appears.
Choose an answer and you’ll find out whether you guessed correctly.
Complete the three-question quiz, and you’ll get a score you can share on your fave social media site—or you can keep going with the quiz fun by taking quizzes from previous days.
We’re just a month out from the launch of the feature, but we’ve seen a more than 65 percent increase in engagement with the cap icon than we saw with hotspots. We’ll continue to update the design of the homepage quiz as we get feedback, but we’re excited about the ways we continue to evolve the homepage experience and inspire our audience to learn about and explore the natural world.
Weekly Trends Quiz
An addition you may have noticed over the past few months is the weekly trends quiz, which is published in the Popular Now carousel—that strip of images at the bottom of the Bing homepage— every Friday. That’s when you can test your news smarts and see how closely you’ve been following Popular Now on the homepage during the week. On average, more than 80 percent of users who start the quiz finish all seven questions, which tells us that users enjoy knowing what to talk about at the water cooler—and that they’re paying attention to what’s running in Popular Now.
The best part? Sharing your results:
The second-best part? You can retake the news quiz until you like your score.
Rewards led the way
Rewards members know that twice a week, they can take a three-question quiz while earning credits on topics ranging from seasonal themes and holiday fare to historical and pop culture events.
Launched in January of 2015, Bing Rewards quizzes were the signal we needed to continue experimenting with targeted, high-impact content experiences—78 percent of Rewards quiz takers complete quizzes, which told us that the motivation to compete was high.
What we didn’t know was which topics would engage. We’ve learned through the trends quiz that news—a combination of both serious and silly stories—is the right mix. Our homepage image is a source of inspiration for millions—and a great visual entrypoint to learn more about the world. We’re betting on the quiz format as the means of driving deeper exploration and serendipitous discovery.
Polls
We’re really excited about these, one of our newest features. Polls give our users and fans a chance to weigh in on current events and trending topics. For example, the killing of Harambe, a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo, after a child fell into his enclosure, drove impassioned debates, online and off—and resulted in one of our most-engaging polls to date.
We’ve also used polls to get a read on what our users were getting mom for Mother’s Day—and whether they spent more on her than dad when Father’s Day rolled around. We’re still working on the right formula, and will continue to iterate and improve our experiences over time.
As always, we welcome your feedback on Bing Listens (https://binglistens.uservoice.com).
Kristen Kennedy, Senior managing editor, and Vinay Krishna, Senior Program Manager