How to choose good questions to ask your audience

Questions should play an important part of your content strategy. They are a useful tool in business marketing especially on social media platforms, but you need to get them right to get the best impact. Asking the right questions demonstrates expertise and shows your audience that you understand what is going on in their world. This makes them feel valued, comfortable and means they are more likely to respond.

To help you select questions that will be useful, remember these basic pointers:

Questions should be about the reader not the writer. Everyone likes to talk about themselves. Or give you their opinion. Use this to your advantage to find out about the people reading your content.

Questions should be quick and easy to read, as well as answer. Everyone is time poor these days especially when on social media. People have short attention span. Make sure you ask a short snappy question, that brings an answer quickly to mind for the reader.

Don’t make questions to personal. There are certain details of life and business that no one will want to share.

Keep questions relevant: except for fun questions (which we shall cover later). If you stray too far away from your usual values and industries, you could alienate your audience and confuse your brand consistency.

Now let’s look at the possible purposes behind asking a question. Understanding why you are asking; will help you choose the right way to ask. The four general reasons to ask questions as a small business:

The purposes of a question.

To increase engagement: Any chance to engage with your audience is always a benefit, after all this is how relationships are built. It may seem like the most obvious reason to ask questions. However, it is not always the easiest to achieve. A study was done of the top 200 brands on Facebook, that showed only 0.5% of their audiences were engaging with them actively. The other 99.5% are still there lurking and keeping variety in your questions can catch a different 0.5% each time if you get the questions right.

Engagement rates on the increase is something we all dream of!

To find out about your audience: Finding out more about your audience is always useful. The more you get to know your readers the more you can find out their likes and dislikes as well as ways your business can help solve these problems.

To have fun: It is well known that business content should not be all sales posts as that puts people off. So, asking a question purely for fun is great for including in your non sales posts whilst still engaging with your audience. The benefit of Fun questions is you can show your personality and be relatable to your audience.

To get an opinion on something you have planned: Market research questions have two-fold benefits, they make your readers feel valued and the information gained from them helps you make decisions based on what your customers want.

Types of questions

Once you have established the purpose for asking your question you need to consider how to ask your question. You have the choice of open or closed questions.

As previously mentioned, people’s attention span on social media is short. Meaning that Close ended questions are often more likely to get answered as they don’t require much thought and you can lead the audience towards their natural response. This could be a giving a choice, such as do you like A or B. A multiple-choice question or poll where you provide answers for them to vote on. Emojis have become a popular way for encouraging people to answer multiple choice question since the removal of the polls function on Facebook pages.

Emoji’s have become a fun way to answer poll questions

As well as being quick and less intimidating to the audience another benefit of closed questions is you can provide specific answers to help you gain relevant information for you to use. Closed questions are ideal for increasing engagement as they tick the fun, quick and simple requirements as well as finding out about your clients.

For example, a fun question could be, What’s your favourite Take away and a list of options covered by emojis!

Or for more serious questions where you want to find out more about what your audience may need from you could ask Do you struggle with: and list say 4 options with either an A B C D or one word answer.

For example: I could use something like this: Which of these tasks do you put off the most:

A- Book keeping

B- Emptying the Inbox

C- Blog writing

D- Updating leads/sales database

Open questions although a little less likely to yield high levels of responses if you have even just a few loyal followers in your audience then open questions can be used to gain their opinions. Not only can this provide great market research but it will also have a stronger effect at making your audience feel valued as your giving them space to express themselves on your chosen topic, showing you value their input.

As previously mentioned getting responses to questions is not always guaranteed, even top brands don’t always get high levels of responses but don’t give up, keep asking questions, keep them varied and use insights wherever possible, or just keep notes somewhere to show you which kinds of questions get good traction so that you can build a picture of what appeals to your audience. When you do get response especially from open ended questions and any question where you wanted your audiences views you may not get the answer you wanted! Try not to take this personally its still information after all even if its not what your hoped for!

If you would like support to find better questions to ask your audience why not join my brainstorm session dedicated to questions to ask your audience.