This post follows up a post yesterday that explored Why Asking Questions on Twitter is a Powerful Technique.
OK – so asking questions is important – but are any questions OK on Twitter? What kind of questions work best?
Here are a few tips for asking questions effectively on Twitter.
Keep Questions Relevant
The types of questions you should ask will depend upon the way you normally use Twitter. If you use it in a personal way then almost any question will work but if your use of Twitter is more focused upon exploring a topic or niche, or if you’re using it for business – you’ll want to keep your questions at least somewhat on topic.
Acknowledge Answers
Simply asking questions and ignoring the answers is something I’ve seen a number of Twitter users do as a strategy for building up follower numbers. The problem with this is that it can leave those who answer feeling a little ignored. Of course it is difficult to respond to every person who answers (last time I asked a question on Twitter I had 100 responses – it would have taken over my day to personally respond to each). A few ways of acknowledging answers that go beyond replying individually include:
- a general ‘thanks for your answers’ type tweet
- picking a few responses to retweet and highlight as key answers
- use answers publicly – for example you could pull the answers together and use them (or at least some of them) in a blog post (see below for an example of this)
- summarize findings – for example if you ask people a ‘yes or not’ question tweet the results – eg: ‘13 people said yes they’ve tweeted from the toilet and 16 said that they hadn’t’
