A great way to engage your audience is to ask questions in your content. A direct question addressed to the reader gets them thinking and encourages them to respond. If done skillfully, you can turn every post into a lively conversation, which gives you a great deal of opportunity to interact with your audience.

But what kinds of questions should you ask? Here are some ideas.

Ask for opinions. Ask your social media contacts for their opinion on a controversial issue. You can take a recent news item or some issue where there are differing opinions in your industry (for example, whether or not you should use a certain type of cleaning product).

Ask how customers overcome common problems. Take a common problem that your readers face and ask them how they overcome the problem. For example, if your audience consists of bloggers, ask them how they drive traffic to their site or how they design their blog for best readability.

Ask how you’re doing. You can use social media and your blog as a means of gathering feedback. Ask your customers how you’re doing. Is your content helpful? What would they like to see more of? Did your product solve their problem? What could you do to improve your content, service, or products?

Ask your readers, “Did you know?” A good way to share a curious or little-known fact with your audience is to pose it as a question. Ask them whether or not they knew about this and what is their opinion of it? This can spark a discussion based around the topic.

Ask for favorites. A great conversation starter is to ask your readers what is their favorite of something. For example, you might ask your blogger audience, “What’s your favorite plug-in?” Each person will state their favorite, but many will give reasons why and this can lead to discussions and disagreements.

Ask about experiences. Ask your audience about a past experience that stands out in their memory. Choose a specific topic. Ask for a major achievement or a hard lesson your readers learned.

As a general rule, ask open-ended questions rather than yes-no questions. If you ask a yes or no question, you’ll end up with many people simply replying “yes” or “no.” Open-ended questions lead your readers to discuss at length and get more deeply into the topic. You can use surveys and polls for gathering data through yes-no questions. Then, use Text iQ – Text Analytics by Qualtrics to analyze, filter, and share insights from your audiences’ survey responses.

What questions have you asked that got engagement from your audience?