New Facebook Data Shows How Questions Impact Comments, Shares & Likes [INFOGRAPHIC]

Last week, we presented our readers with some interesting data about the impact of social CTAs on Facebook engagement. But we got to wondering -- what about posing questions in your Facebook posts? How would that impact engagement metrics such as Likes, shares, and comments?

If you're an active Facebook marketer, you've probably seen countless brands using questions as a fan engagement tactic. By asking questions, the social media managers behind those pages are hoping to generate responses, thereby increasing engagement rates. In fact, the power of questions on Facebook has been accepted conventional wisdom for some time now.

Digging into a large data set of more than 1.2 million posts from the 10,000 most Liked Facebook Pages, I was able to not only verify that anecdotal evidence, but also figure out specifically which types of questions work best. Let's take a look at what I uncovered ...

Marketing Takeaway

As you can see in the infographic, I found that while posts with questions tend to generate more comments, they also tend to garner fewer Likes and shares than non-question posts. In other words, the data shows that periodically using questions to encourage commenting does work, but they are not an all-encompassing engagement panacea. Posing questions can be a great way to elicit feedback from your Facebook fans and page visitors, but it's not the most effective way to drive overall Facebook engagement.

In addition, we can also see that question words that yield "yes" or "no" responses such as "should" and "would" -- as well as multiple choice questions like "which" -- tend to generate more comments than nebulous, open-ended questions like "why" and "how." The takeaway here is, if you're using questions to generate more comments on your Facebook Page, post questions that are quick and easy to answer.

How are you using questions on your Facebook Page timeline? Have you experienced similar results?