183: 9 Types of Questions to Ask On Your FaceBook Page to Get More Comments

Hello there and welcome to Episode 183 of the ProBlogger podcast.

My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com; a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you start the most amazing blog, to grow your audience, to create content that changes that audience’s life in some way, and hopefully to make a little bit of money from your blog along the way or a lot, hopefully. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com.

In today’s lesson, I want to give you some really practical things that you can do to increase the engagement, particularly to get more people to comment upon your Facebook page. If you have them, your Facebook groups, and other types of social media as well.

Most bloggers do spend a lot of time on Facebook and that’s for a good reason, it’s not because we’re all distracted and sit there looking at cat memes all day, some of us probably do that too. The main reason I think bloggers tend to be attracted to Facebook, particularly with their blogging, is the amount of potential readers for our blog who are there at any one time on a daily basis. If you look at the stats of how many people are using Facebook, it is quite staggering. It’s where a lot of people are spending a lot of time. It makes sense for us who want to reach those types of people to have a presence in this platform.

The problem is using Facebook to grow your audience is getting increasingly tough. If you’ve been blogging for two, or three, or four years, you probably have seen the changes that have happened over that time, particularly if you want to grow your audience on Facebook organically and you don’t have the budget to advertise. You can certainly reach a lot of people if you’ve got money to spend, but if you want to do it organically, it can be tough. It’s not impossible though.

One of the reasons that it’s not impossible is that there are still things that you can do to increase your effectiveness on Facebook. One of those things is to build engagement with those who already follow you on Facebook. Facebook has this algorithm with many factors that determine how widely they will show your updates. One of the signals to Facebook that you are doing something worth showing to more people is to build engagement with your posts. If Facebook sees your posts getting some engagement, they will show your post to more people.

If you are like me and you want to get more engagement on Facebook, you are going to want to really work on engagement. That’s what this podcast is all about today. I particularly want to focus upon how to get more comments for your Facebook page. If that’s something that is of interest to you, this show is for you.

Getting people to comment on your Facebook updates is very important. I’ve already told you the main reason for that, it’s a signal to Facebook that what you’re doing is good and it helps you get seen more. But, there’s some other reasons why I think engagement is well worth trying to get on your page. It’s also a signal to your readers that you’re interested in them and you’re not just interested in them following you and clicking on your links, but you are actually interested in engaging with them. It’s like going to a party and meeting someone for the first time and they ask you a lot of questions, you get the sense that they’re interested in you. That’s a good thing because you have a good feeling and you want to spend more time with that person. It’s a great way to build that relationship, to warm up that relationship with a potential reader.

The other reason, it’s really great for social proof as well. If someone else stumbles upon your Facebook page and sees that you’re engaging with your audience and that they are engaging with you, that’s going to make you much more attractive to them and they’re much more likely to join in.

There’s a variety of different reasons why engagement and particularly getting comments on Facebook is a useful thing. There’s also a variety of ways to get that engagement. Obviously, the number one thing that you want to do is to get people to like your Facebook page, that’s one type of engagement. Then, there’s getting people to react to your updates on Facebook. Traditionally, this was about getting a like on your post but today there’s all these other emoji reactions, people can love, laugh, they can do the wow emoji, they can be sad, they can be angry. Those type of reactions are one type of engagement that Facebook lets you get.

And then, there’s getting the share which is really great. It’s where someone shares the update that you’ve done to their followers or on a page or a group that they’re involved in. All of these things are signals to Facebook, they’re really positive. The one that I like the best is the comment. Getting someone to leave a comment on your Facebook update is great. Again, it’s a signal to Facebook, the reason I like it though is that it tells you something about your audience and it’s them stepping out of lurking mode and putting themselves out there.

If you can get a comment on your Facebook page or even your blogpost or anywhere on social media, that’s someone pausing and not just going for the easy option of the like button but they’re actually putting themselves out there to react. That very often is a really important part in the building of that relationship.

If you think about real life and when relationships take off, think back to when you first met a friend. It’s the first words that come out of your mouth and the first words that come out of their mouth that often create that impression and take that relationship to the next level. It’s the conversation where you go deeper.

This is why I want to focus today’s episode on how to get more comments on your Facebook page. We may go into how to get more shares and likes and those types of things in another episode but today I want to focus on the number one way to get more comments on your Facebook page. It’s not really rocket science, but there’s a variety of techniques in doing this. The number way that I found to get more comments on your Facebook page, on your blog post, on social media of any kind, is simply to ask questions.

That seems pretty obvious but I’m amazed how many Facebook pages never, ever ask questions. I followed lots of Facebook pages, I’ve lost count of how many I follow. Most of them never actually ask questions, they never do the most obvious thing to get me to comment and to engage with them, they never ask me a question. They make it so easy for me to look and to stay passive in that relationship.

If you think about the real world interactions that we have, a very large percentage of conversations start with a question. Think about it, you might even want to track it over the next 24 hours. Over the next day, track how many times a conversation that you have starts with either you or the other person asking a question. Usually, they’re kind of almost greeting like questions, like how are you, what are you up to, how is your day, how are you feeling? These things are almost substitutes for saying hi. Here in Australia, we go hey, how is it going, mate? We’re not always expecting an answer to that question, it’s more of a greeting than anything, but it’s still a question that opens the conversation.

There’s questions opening conversations but that’s also how conversations go deeper. Think about the last deep and meaningful conversation that you had, it almost always gets deep and meaningful because at least one person in that conversation starts asking some deeper questions. They start scratching and going below the surface with a question.

Questions lead to meaningful conversations, questions lead to learning, to deeper relationships in real life. If the goal of our blog is to grow an audience with people who feel like they know, like, and trust us, then I think we need to ask questions online too, and particularly in the Facebook space. Questions are great but what type of questions should we be asking?

This is what I want to do for the rest of this particular episode. I want to actually outline for you some of my favorite types of questions to ask on Facebook. I’ve actually got nine types of questions that you can ask. You may even, an idea to do this, ask one of these types of questions on your Facebook page as this episode is going on. I dare you to do it and then to leave a comment at the end and let us know what question you asked.

Nine types of questions that you can go away right now and ask on your Facebook page. Number one, and this I think is the easiest one to do and it is possibly the most effective one as well. In fact, I just did it a few minutes ago on my own Facebook page on Digital Photography School and immediately started to get comments.

Number one, ask a fill in the blank type question. This is where you might say, this is the exact question that I asked on my Photography School Facebook page—I had: Fill in the blank, “The lens attached to my main camera right now is ______.” I’m basically asking what lens is attached to your question right now. I used the fill in the blank type format to do that.

If you’ve got a blog about blogging, you might ask, “My first blogging platform was ________.” You might say, “My first camera was ________.” “The words that describe my approach to diet is _______,” if you’re a food blogger. “My favorite comfort food is _________.” Really, any question can be turned into a fill in the blank type post. The beauty of this type of question is that it is incredibly simple for someone to answer. All they have to do to leave a comment is to write one word. This is the lowest barrier of entry that you can possibly give to anyone leaving a comment.

Often, this is a good way to get that person who might have been following your page for a while now to leave their first comment. They don’t really have to reveal anything too deep and personal, they just need to put in a word. You want to make sure that the question is related to your overall topic, you don’t just want to be asking random questions that have nothing to do with your topic. Too often, I do see some Facebook pages doing that. I’m a big believer in trying to keep it relevant. Fill in the blank type posts are the first type of questions you might ask.

Another one which is similar in some ways because it sometimes can mean a one word response or one word comment is when you ask a question that is this or that type of question. It’s where you give your followers the choice between two options and in doing so, you say here’s the two responses I’m looking for, which one are you? You might say are you a cat or dog person?

On Digital Photography School, we occasionally have a question which is about Nikon versus Canon. That always starts a bit of a fight. Or, do you post process your photos or do you not post process your photos? We know that within our audience, there’s these two camps. We start a discussion on that.

Yes or no questions might be another option. If you’re a fitness blogger, you might say do you exercise daily, yes or no? There’s only two answers really there. Some people will come in with a sometimes, but that’s totally fine as well.

A true or false question might be another one, it’s a this or that.

I guess the last one I’ll say there is you might actually want to choose a question that is some sort of a controversy or some sort of a debate. You want to be a little bit careful with this because these types of questions can be a bit edgier, so during the election you might have said Trump or Hillary. On the photography space, the Nikon Canon one, that’s a bit of a debate. The reason we don’t ask it too often is we do see other camera manufacturers, people who have those cameras chime in but it also can get a bit negative. You do want to be a bit careful about this or that questions, particularly if it’s a debate or a controversial type thing. They can be a really good discussion starter as well and are worthy experimenting with.

Number one was fill in the blank type questions, number two were this or that questions, number three is another one. I’ve got a few types but I’ve seen other bloggers use this incredibly well, it’s actually a technique that one of my online friends Samantha Jockel from School Mum regularly uses. She actually takes questions that readers have emailed her and she puts it up on Facebook as a discussion starter. The questions, because her blog is School Mum, her questions generally relate to parenting or family life or school life.

I was just looking at her page a few minutes ago and the last one of these that she posted, she starts it with this little phrase, “A school mom asked…” That’s the signal to the audience that it’s this type of question. Everyday, she does a School Mum ask type post. After it, she says, “Can I please ask how much do you give your kids for school lunch, as my kids are always hungry. P.S. Any food ideas, please.” This is a question that someone sent Samantha. She has put it up on the page.

If you go and look at her Facebook page, every single day, there is a post that is a reader question. Sometimes, the questions are heartfelt, sometimes it’s a real problem that a person is having, they’re always anonymous so people do tend to ask those personal questions. Sometimes, they’re funny, sometimes they start debates, sometimes they’re on those controversial type issues. Perhaps, they’re an easier way to get into those controversial questions because it’s a reader asking the question rather than you.

These posts, many of them do really well. Again, I encourage you to go and look at Samantha’s Facebook page and you’ll see some examples of the different types of questions that she’s asked. Ask a reader question. If you’re getting questions from readers, you probably just need to dig into your blog posts, comments, or comments that have been left on your Facebook page, or emails that you’ve been receiving, or you might actually want to do an update saying do you have any questions, and actually gather the questions that way. If you get questions, turn them into Facebook updates. Let your readers, let your community find the answers to those questions as well. They can do really well.

The fourth one is questions where you ask your readers to talk about their biggest problems, challenges, or obstacles, or even fears. This might seem like a negative thing to do, you might want to keep a positive vibe on your Facebook page, but it’s amazing what comes out when you actually nominate a topic and say what’s your biggest problem in this area?

To take Samantha’s example again on School Mum, she might ask a question like what’s your biggest fear as a parent? What’s your biggest challenge at the moment in raising boys? What’s the biggest problem that you have in the area of discipline? You can actually target the types of questions that you want to explore. To actually get your readers to come out and share some of the problems and challenges and pain that they have, the fears that they have, it might feel like a negative thing but it actually does lead to high engagement, people are willing to share this type of stuff.

The best thing about these types of questions is they’ll help you to understand who is following your page. You’ll begin to see things about your audience that you never knew before. These things will inform future pieces of content for your site as well. This is something if you follow me on the Facebook page, at the ProBlogger Facebook page, you’ll see that almost every week we ask a question that is really about trying to work out what the biggest obstacle is for our readers at the moment. Those answers often turn into blog posts.

The other great thing about this type of question is that you’ll find that in the responses, people will nominate problems that they’ve got that you’ve already written about. You can reply to that and say hey, here’s a tutorial I wrote on that topic, or here’s an article with some tips on how to overcome that challenge. You can actually drive people back to your archives by sharing links in response to the problems that people have.

The ultimate thing here, being willing to talk about people’s problems is that you show your readers that you’re interested in helping them, you’re interested in hearing about their problems, and you also give them a chance to solve one another’s problems as well. This is something I did in our Facebook group, the ProBlogger podcast listeners group that we’ve got on Facebook the other day.

Actually, on a Friday afternoon I think that was, I said what’s your biggest problem now? I’m going away for the weekend but I know you can answer each other’s problems. It was amazing to see people chime in and respond to each other’s problems in that way. That may not work quite so well on an open page, but in a Facebook page it might work as well. It gives your followers a sense that they’re not alone.

Even though I just said I went away for a weekend when I asked that question, I did qualify that by saying you need to look after each other here. When you do ask these types of questions, it’s really ideal if you hang around immediately after you ask that question. You want to be there to respond to the problems that people have, to be present, interact with them, help them where you can, and to show empathy. It’s really important not just to ask those questions to trigger the pain in people’s lives but to be there to walk with them in that as well.

The fifth one is the flip side of this and that is to ask people about their dreams, to ask them about their aspirations. It’s really important to not just understand who your readers and their problems but to also understand who they want to become. Again, this shows them that you’re interested in them making some changes in their life and you also will get a lot of ideas for the types of things that they want to learn how to do. Then, you can create content that helps to move them along towards those dreams that they have as well. People do love to talk about their dreams, they love to talk about their hopes for their future. That’s the fifth type of question that you can ask on your Facebook page.

The sixth type is what I would call a tips question. This is where you ask your followers for their tips. They’re probably coming to your Facebook page because they want to learn from you, but the reality is that in any community, more than two or three people, there’s a lot of wisdom in the crowd.

In fact, many years ago now, I read a book called Wisdom Of The Crowd that really highlighted this. Any group of people has the ability to solve most problems that we face. This is where you actually say to your audience, “I want to hear from you today with your tips,” about a particular area. You may not get as many responses from this type of question as you would from a fill in the blank type question. The responses that you will get will be deeper, they’ll also be longer and they’ll be more useful, they’ll be the types of comments that other readers will gain a lot of value from as well.

You might ask a question that really taps into a typical question that a beginner in your topic has, and then you put that question to your audience and say what would you answer to this type of question? What tips do you have, what stories, what tools would you use? You really are looking for those tips there.

The other thing that I love about this type of question is that you can turn the answers into content if you get permission. This is something that again you will probably have seen me do on my Facebook page, the ProBlogger Facebook page. If I’m writing a blog post or if I’m preparing for a podcast, very often in the week before the podcast comes out in our Facebook group for instance, I will ask a question that relates to the podcast. Really, what I’m trying to do there is to get the audience’s ideas that I can then incorporate into the podcast. Of course, you want to give credit to the people who leave those responses.

You might say if you’re writing a post about exercise on your fitness blog, try to work out the top ten exercises that your readers love to do. You can ask what’s your favorite exercise and why do you like it? Underneath that, you might say I’m going to use some of your responses in a future blog post. Anyone who does leave a comment is kind of agreeing that they want their comment to be on the blog post. Then, you can take their responses and you can either embed them into your post or you might just copy and paste them into your blog post. Of course, giving credit to the person who left their response.

And then, you are basically creating reader generated content for your site. It’s not just your voice, it’s theirs as well. Of course, you probably want to add a few of your own comments to that to build upon the ideas that your readers share, but these types of questions work really well.

Typically, these types of questions would usually start with how do you do type questions. How do you do this, how do you do that? How would you approach this situation? Asking for tips, that’s question number six.

Number seven is another one. This one probably won’t work for everyone but I think it can probably be stretched to a lot of Facebook pages. It’s something we do very regularly on our site. We actually ask our readers to share a photo. You could ask them to share a photo or a video. If you go on our Facebook page, you will see that when people are given the opportunity to leave a comment, there’s a little icon in that comments window where they can upload a photo or a video as well. I’m amazed how many pages don’t utilize this feature.

Obviously, it works really well on my Digital Photography School site. We have a site about photography so every week, at least once, we ask our readers, upload your best portrait from the last month, or upload your best landscape in the last month, upload a picture that you think will be improved in post production. We have some discussions around that.

We actually ask our readers to upload a photo or a video. It works really well. We end up with a long list of photos instead of comments. Many people don’t even leave an actual comment, they’ll just share the photo.

You might think this doesn’t really to my blog, I don’t have a photography blog, but I have seen this work on plenty of blogs. I saw a parenting blogger ask recently, show us a favorite piece of art from one of your kids. I saw a food blogger ask, show us the last picture in your camera phone that you took of food. That was pretty funny actually because there were really nice pictures and really ugly ones as well. I saw a fashion blogger ask, show your your favorite pair of shoes. A technology blogger asked, show us a picture of everything that you have in your laptop bag.

You can, at a stretch, find at least one question that you could ask that you want people to respond to with that picture or a video. It’s just an alternative way.

Again, you might not get quite as many comments but you’ll get some really interesting ones as well. I guess again you could probably takes some of those pictures if you made it clear in your question and put it into a blog post. Maybe you can create a little SlideShare of all the different photos that were submitted, or maybe you can pick your best three or four and write about why you like them in a blog post. Again, you want to get a bit of permission on that because you don’t want to use other people’s photos without their permission. I think most people would be pretty cool with that, that’s question number seven.

Number eight is accountability questions. This, again, may not work for all pages but I think a lot of them might work. This is where you ask your followers, the people who like your page, a question to get them to nominate something that they’re going to do in order for you to keep them accountable.

You may have been a part of Facebook groups that do this and this happens in a lot of Facebook groups. What’s your biggest goal of the week? You can ask that on your Facebook page. I think you can take it a step further if at the end of the week you went back to that post and asked anyone who responded with a goal how they went with that goal.

I actually saw this happen on a Facebook page recently where the person on Monday morning just had a very simple question, what do you want to achieve this week? What’s your biggest goal this week? And then on Friday, he came back and he left a reply on every single person’s comment who mentioned a goal and all he had was a few words, how did you go with…?

I was actually someone who left a comment at the start of a week and I hadn’t done my goal by the end of the week. You know what? I went away and got it done about ten minutes after he left that comment. I’m really grateful for him because he took the time to come back to me and keep me accountable to that.

I think this could be done on all kinds of Facebook pages, not every time. If you have any kind of page where people are trying to build a habit, where they’re trying to learn something, where they’re trying to become something, you could certainly ask this type of question and then come back to them. Not to whip them, not to make them feel bad if they haven’t met their goal, but simply to encourage them and to build some accountability into that. I think that makes a massive impression upon people. I know I’ll be going back to that page, I’ll be making it a big part of what I do because I know that guy is taking the time to notice my goal.

The last type of question that I want to briefly talk about is where you use questions in other types of blog posts. Most of what I talked about in the previous eight types of questions that you can ask is really when you ask a question as your status update. The fill in the blank question, that’s your update, that’s all you have in it. You might include a picture or something like that but really the update is the question.

You can also ask questions in other types of updates too. I think that can actually make them more effective. I want to give you an example, and to see the example, you’re going to have to go over the show notes. A few days ago on my Digital Photography School Facebook page, I shared a link to an older post that I’ve written, about three or four months ago now. It was a link to a post which listed popular cameras in our readers. Again, you can check this out on the show notes.

The title of the post was very simply The 19 Most Popular Compact System And Mirrorless Cameras With Our Readers. I could quite easily have just put the link in the Facebook but in addition to that, I also added a question. When I put the link in the Facebook, Facebook automatically pulled in the title. It automatically pulled in the picture from the post. There’s also an opportunity to add a little bit extra into your Facebook update. Before I schedule it, I added the question, “Do you use one of these popular compact system cameras?” Just a little question.

My goal for that post was to get people over to my blog post. By adding that question, I also got people answering the question which I think in the end helped me to get even more people to the blogpost because at this moment, as I just went and looked at it now, 23 people have answered that question which is good for us. When we share a link, we don’t tend to get a lot of comments because people either ignore it or they go and read the blog post and then they don’t leave a comment.

In this case, 23 people answered the question. That’s higher than normal for us. The post also had a higher than average reach, and I suspect because people were leaving comments, Facebook thought something is good with this, we’re going to show it more. It got a higher reach than normal, and it also got a lot of really good click through traffic to our blogpost as well. I think that’s because the question I asked, people needed to go and read the post before they could answer it. Those 23 people who left a comment, they at least went away and had a look at the cameras listed on the page so that they could answer the question.

Asking questions in link posts can work. Sometimes, I will make the title that I use on Facebook to a link post a question rather than the actual title of the blog post, you can change it. Asking questions can actually just give your normal post on Facebook a bit of a boost as well.

There are the types of questions that I think you could be asking on your Facebook page. Hopefully by now, you’ve already asked one of them. You could’ve done the fill in the blank post question. You could’ve done a this or that type question. You could’ve done a reader question, you might’ve done a question to unearth the problems, challenges, obstacles and fears of your readers. You could ask a question to unearth their dreams, their aspirations, you could ask your readers for a tip. You could ask your readers a question that is about making them accountable. You could ask them a question as a part of a link post that you’re doing as well. The key is to get in the habit of asking questions and to mix it up.

I’ve got a few other really quick tips when it comes to asking questions.

Number one, I think it’s really important as I said earlier to make your questions relate to your topic. You may be able to get some engagement by doing off topic questions from time to time and that might be okay from time to time, but if you do that regularly, your readers are going to feel that your page topic has begun to dilute. Be a little bit weary of going too off topic.

Number two, consider using an image. You can ask a question and that might get seen by people but if you use an image that relates to your question, it’s just going to pop in the news feed a little bit more. People will notice that a little bit more. You might just have a plain image or you might even get an image and then put some text over the top with the question itself, that can also get a little bit more engagement.

Another alternative might be to ask the question as a video. You might actually want to do a Facebook live, we talked about that a few episodes ago, get on Facebook live and ask your readers a question. That will then appear in their feed later on after the Facebook live is open as a replay, as a video. We all know that Facebook Lives get more reach than other types of posts. Maybe try and incorporate the Facebook Live episode a couple of weeks ago with asking a question.

The fourth thing I’ll say is that timing is really important. You don’t want to ask questions when your audience are all asleep. I did this stupidly the other night, I had this question pop into my mind that I wanted to share my audience. I asked it at 3:30PM Australian time which is in the middle of the night when most of my audience are awake in America, and it’s also when my Aussie audience are picking up kids at school or about to go home from work. It was just a bad time. I know my readers aren’t online at 3:30PM.

If you’ve got a question that you want to ask, schedule it for a time when your readers are engaging with your page. It’s really important to do that.

Don’t ask too many questions would be another little tip. I think it’s important to mix up the type of post that you publish. Share some links, share some videos, share some pictures, and share some questions as well. When you mix up the types of content that you share, Facebook seems to reward that.

Be responsive, as responsive as you can on your Facebook page. When people respond with an answer to a question that you have, it’s really nice if they then get a response from you. They’ve taken the time to respond to you, take some time to respond to them. You need to be the community that you want to have. If you want engagement, you need to be engaging with your posts.

Another really quick tip is to ask timely questions. If something big is happening, whether it be a holiday, an event that’s relevant to your industry, maybe it’s an event like the Oscars which just happened. If you can find a relevant way to ask a question about that timely event, it can really help. For starters, it’s on the top of mind of your audience and so they may have already been thinking about that and be more likely to want to talk about it. It also can work in Facebook as well. Facebook has trending topics. If you use words that are trending at a time, Facebook might share that a little bit more often as well.

The last thing I’ll say is you’d be really careful about how open ended your questions are. You can ask really open ended questions but I find I get much better responses if I’m specific with my question, if I’m narrow-ish and have focus with my question. That’s why I think fill in the blank questions do quite well because they’re very narrow, you’re just looking for one word and you’re nominating the topic. If you’re too open ended, sometimes the response tend to be a bit wishy washy or people don’t know how to respond as well. You want to make it easy for people to respond to your questions, at least as easy as possible.

I hope that somewhere in the midst of today’s show, there are some questions that you can ask on your Facebook page. Again, these are the types of things you could also be asking in a Facebook group, LinkedIn group, pretty much any type of social media. Or, even on your blog. You may actually want to try doing some blog posts that are centered around questions as well. This is again a big thing that I get asked a lot by bloggers, how do I get people to leave a comment on my blog post? One of the best things you can do is to learn to ask good questions.

I’m sure as I’ve gone through this that some of you are thinking, “He didn’t mention this one,” or that, if you’ve got another type of question that you’d like to ask, I would love to hear what that is in today’s show notes. You can go to problogger.com/podcast/183 and tell us about the types of questions that you like to ask.

I’m also really interested if any of you, during the listening of this podcast, went to your page and asked a question. If you did, congratulations, I would love to know what that question was.

You might even want to leave a link on the comments on the show notes today as well to that question. You can also leave comments in our Facebook group, just search on ProBlogger for the ProBlogger Podcast Listeners group, there’s 2,500 people in there who do discuss each episode and who do a few challenges together as well.

Thanks for listening today, I’ll chat with you next week on the ProBlogger Podcast.