21 Facts On How Questions Get Answered On Twitter [INFOGRAPHIC]

One of the things I love about being on Twitter is the fact that it is the most open platform I know. You can quickly ask anything to all your followers and in most cases get a reply faster than googling.

Twitter has developed its own hashtag, similar to a code for answering these questions. The hashtag used for whenever people ask general questions they need help with is #lazyweb. I am sure you have come across it before.

An example I have used myself a lot in the past is to ask for tools of all sorts that people use to be more efficient. Like this:

“What Twitter tools are you using to most efficiently handling multiple Twitter accounts? #Lazyweb #ToolsChat”

What’s interesting is that there is huge amount of different questions asked, most of them with the #lazyweb hashtag, all the time at any given day. The guys from InboxQ have analysed all questions asked out there and built a beautiful infographic around it.

The top 3 topics that people ask about are:

• Programming: “Dear #lazyweb, which browser support document.querySelectorAll()?”
• Tech support: “I can’t find the option to resize images in Windows. Anyone know how to do it? #lazyweb”
• Product recommendations: “Hey #lazyweb, any suggestions for a cheap scanner/printer combo under $250?”

How to answer questions on Twitter to your advantage

Now of course, it is interesting to ask questions yourself. What about if we flip this around? There is often plenty of questions that you can answer for anyone being on Twitter.

The reasons for doing this are quite obvious. If you are offering a service or product, you can quickly help out a great number of people. If you answer the right questions, and you could help them out, they will most certainly be interested in what else it is you are doing.

In fact, in the early days of Buffer, I would answer tons of questions from people about Twitter tools, tips to get started on Twitter and more. Naturally, they started following me, checked out what else I was doing.

The best part? Many became Buffer users to help them make their life easier on Twitter and Facebook.

3 Tips to make answering questions on Twitter easier

So here are 3 quick tips that will help you do the same and answer questions in a focused manner:

• Follow the right questions: Setup 1 to 3 columns inside TweetDeck or HootSuite with the most relevant key words for your niche. In my case, I had setup “scheduling Tweets” as one, “Getting started on Twitter” as another and “Best tool Twitter” as  a third. This will immediately give you a great number of questions to reply to.
• Setup InboxQ: InboxQ is another amazing tool I love using. It allows you to monitor questions on Twitter similar to emails and you can reply to them straight from your browser. The various campaigns to setup are also very powerful.
• Join Twitter chats: The 3rd suggestion I have is to start joining Twitter chats. They are a great way to find experts about certain areas. For example, I would keep questions about Social Media tools to ask them in #ToolsChat every week (Wednesday 7pm EST) as I know lots of people will be able to help me out. Here is  a great list of all Twitter chats out there.

So without further ado, here is a list of all the top mentioned questions on Twitter:

Bonus: Which Twitter users are getting asked the most questions?

Now, whilst it is interesting to know which questions are asked the most, it is also very cool to see, which people receive the most questions.

Here is another very cool infographic about which types of people are getting asked the most questions on Twitter:

How are you using Twitter to get answers?

Over to you now. I am sure you have tried answering or asking questions sometime in the past on Twitter. Do you think some of the above tips can help you turn Twitter into a more powerful tool for you too?

Source: Both infographics are from InboxQ