If you feel like nobody is listening to you on Facebook, you’re probably asking the wrong questions, or more likely, you’re not asking them in the right way.
Social engagement is a tough thing to get right, but there are some proven ways to connect with your fans, and have them respond to your questions – to stop you from feeling like you’re literally talking to a brick wall.
Dan Martell told me about a simple technique that worked really well for the Flowtown Facebook page.
It’s based on asking open ended questions like this: My favorite restaurant in San Francisco is ________?
Basically it’s a fill in the blank type question that encourages people to be creative or funny, which creates a cyclic effect where others comment on the answers and offer their own once the conversation is started.
So what can you do to make people listen, and respond?
Social stats phenom Dan Zarella, from Hubspot, has done the research to answer this question for you. So let’s dissect the subtle nuances of your questions to see which work best.
- Tradeoff: One important thing to note is, that despite questions increasing comment engagement, they also apparently decrease the number of likes and shares. My thinking on this is that by commenting, people are more actively engaged and don’t pay as much attention to liking something – as they think they’ve already participated enough.
- Coulda, woulda, shoulda: The difference between these words may seem simplistic (and realistically there isn’t much variation in the efficacy of either of the top words). The most important part of the graphic below, is how differently the less powerful words succeed in engaging people. This is where all of your attention should be spent.
It’s a simple graphic, with a simple point. So go read the picture…
Facebook Tweetables
Share these testing tips with your followers. And remember that you can change the tweet text before it goes out.
- Facebook posts that include ‘Should,’ ‘would’ and ‘who’ get more comments
» Tweet This « - Facebook posts that include questions tend to get more comments, but fewer shares and likes
» Tweet This « - Facebook comments that include ‘why’ and ‘how’ get the least amount of comments
» Tweet This «
