One mistake I see MANY marketers–even TOP “gurus”–making is that they rely almost exclusively on open-ended questions in their surveys.

I’m going to show you why this is a mistake and how to avoid it.

In business surveys, I recommend that about 85-90% of your questions be closed-ended (meaning you write choices to give the respondent), rather than open-ended.

Why?

Two reasons:

1. From your point of view, open-ended questions just give you too much information.  Imagine getting thousands of responses with long, open-ended answers.  Wading through it all and trying to come up with a real analysis of what’s there requires not just a lot of time but also a lot of skill.
2. In most cases, your customers HATE open-ended questions.  They take far more time and thought to answer than closed-ended questions do.  That means you’re less likely to hear from a broad base of your customers AND you’re more likely to irritate them–something you NEVER want to do with a survey.

But open-ended questions DO have their place.

You can include them in a survey after open-ended questions, to ask things such as “Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about ______?

• That way, you can pick up information and ideas you might not have thought to ask.
• You’ll also start to pick up some of the language of your customers, language you can use in your marketing.

Open-ended questions are also really useful to get information you feed INTO closed-ended questions in surveys.

• So, if you ask questions such as, “What’s your most important question about _____?” or “What problem or issue about ______ keeps you awake at night?” can give you impressions that you can then test, in a survey, with closed-endd questions.

Follow these suggestions and you’ll see your response rates–and your profits–grow.

To learn a quick, easy, foolproof system for writing closed-ended questions, check out our survey system.

A new survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that 19%, or nearly 1 in 5, of Americans who use the Internet also use Twitter or some other type of social networking “status update” service.

Although these results are being widely touted as showing how widespread Twitter use is, that’s not necessarily true. Because the question included not only Twitter but also other status update services–such as Facebook–it’s impossible to tell how much of this activity is really on Twitter, as opposed to other social media sites.

The survey also reinforces just how important mobile phones have become for social networking. Only 10% of people who have only one Internet-connected device (such as a computer) report using status updating services, but nearly 40% of people who have 4 or more Internet-connected devices use these social media services.

The survey also shows that more than half (55%) of those who use status update services are under age 50.