I like how you went META with that poll, “Do polls increase engagement?” Perhaps Holly Ross is right, perhaps the best thing to do is just look at the Likes and the commenting. Perhaps people are tired of polls and want to be engaged in a more meaningful way, perhaps through one on one emails?

I think that this is what is going to separate our online generation from the previous ones, being able to say,

“Okay, this is what we’re saying, and

“This is how we’re saying it, and

“Here’s the framework of ideas and assumptions around what we’re saying,” and

“If we had a different framework, we’d be saying THIS instead!”

Getting the power of the collective mind behind our comments and posts, allowing people to share their knowledge and ideas, as you said.

Here’s a top tip.

One thing which I saw Claire Sale of Netsquared get a LOT of results with was posting your blog question on linkedin, if appropriate, then getting the answers and posting these as comments on your blog.

Suddenly, you go where people are, you ask an intelligent question, and you get the collective to come to your website.

Cheers!

Mazarine

Two things: Post Quality is useful if you understand what it means – percent of total fans on your Page that engage during a rolling seven days. But, as you and I both know, seven days is not enough time to see deeper trends within a Page community. Facebook Insights are much better for that. But I think folks should use both Post Quality (for “drive by” analysis) and Insights for deeper trends.

Your experiment on polls was insightful – particularly that a higher level of engagement was realized with open ended questions. I’ve found that engagement increases with well-thought out questions that are either provocative or novell. Page admins should get to know the essence of their community so that they can post questions that truly resonate with the community. After all, Facebook users love to share and connect. Good questions serve this need.

I think NPOs may realize the need to have a presence in social media and connect with their markets via the web, but a lot of times don’t know how to effectively leverage those tools to get the results they want. So glad people like you are willing to share your knowledge to help those worthy causes in their pursuit to connect with people.

Oh, and thanks for the recommendation for Mari’s book. I’ll definitely check that out also.