If you aren’t asking questions on social media, you’re doing it wrong

In today’s busy and noisy digital landscape, we often hear that it’s important to listen to the conversation going on online. In addition, we are also hearing how important it is to have an active and healthy presence on the social web. Even though these two statements are true, you must also start asking questions on the social web. Not asking in the form of selling online, but purely in the form of asking questions to your network, target audience, and clients to start engaging with them.

It’s human that people want to tell their achievements and success stories online or share something interesting where they overcame any hurdles to achieve success. It’s natural that we want to hear about these experiences, but we get too caught up by our own schedule or we are afraid to ask for this information.

If you are already busy with a social media campaign or you are starting one, take your engagement with your strategy to a new level and ask some questions online. Here’s a couple of discussions I have been part:

Are you measuring the ROI of your social media campaign? I posted this question in a discussion group and received quite a few comments and emails from people who saw this question and had troubles measuring the effectiveness of their social media efforts.

Which social media channels are the best? This was posted on my blog and shared to a couple of relevant LinkedIn groups. This started an active discussion on LinkedIn and my blog as well.

Is Google+ starting to pickup? This was posted on my Twitter profile and got the attention of others who are also seeing the activity on Google+ picking up.

Ask for your target audience’s input to take your communication strategy with social media further. A while ago it was easy to go to LinkedIn Answers and post a couple of questions and answer ones as well. This has been removed, but it was a great way to establish yourself as the go-to source to find answers in your industry. There are many channels online that focus on asking questions like Quora, but you don’t have to rely on only using these channels to post your questions. Use the channels you are using everyday.

In my opinion, asking questions online should definitely be part of your social media strategy. You don’t need to go to a specific question-and-answers-only site to do this. Do this as part of your learning plan to get new ideas. If you do it this way, you will notice that asking questions online is another part of engaging, gaining new followers, and learning in the process. If you integrate this in your social media plan, you will definitely see results while you are learning in the process.