You may have noticed that I’ve disappeared from the blog during the past few weeks. That’s because my husband and I just moved and have been busy packing, unpacking, getting organized and assembling Ikea furniture.
Now, we’re pretty much settled. I have a nicer home office and am hoping that it inspires lots of new blog posts. Without further ado, here’s this week’s post…
I was writing an article last week and needed to get feedback from a few subject-matter experts to complete a draft. However, the people I wanted to connect with were not responding to my request. As you know, this is a common problem when you’re under deadline and trying to develop content – people are busy and don’t get back to you.
Since I couldn’t wait forever, I had to take another course of action and turned to social media. After posing my question on a few key social media channels, I ended up with more great feedback than I could use! Here is how it worked:
1. I started with Twitter. I’m a huge Twitter fan and usually turn to Twitter first when it comes to asking questions and getting immediate feedback. However, the target audience for the article was different than the audience I interact with on Twitter. I wasn’t expecting much of a response, but I put it out there anyway. Although no one had an answer for my question, Twitter still turned out to be a useful tool, because I received interest from people who wanted to read the finished article.
However, if your Twitter audience is the same as the audience for the piece of content you are developing, you can usually get a good response. Just be sure to tweet your question a few times to maximize your chances of people seeing it. I’ve been using Hootsuite’s AutoSchedule tool to increase the odds of people responding to my tweets, as it determines the optimal time to post your tweets for maximum exposure and response.
2. I connected with subject-matter experts on LinkedIn Answers. Unlike LinkedIn Groups, you don’t need to be a pre-approved member to ask questions on LinkedIn Answers. You simply write your question and then select the audience that you want to target. Within minutes of posting my question, I had several great responses. If you decide to use this feature often, you may want to spend some time giving back to the community by answering questions that are in your area of expertise.
3. I asked my friends on Facebook to help. One of the things I like about Facebook is that it allows you to tag specific friends in your status updates, so I tagged a few of my friends who work in the industry I was writing about. Not only did they help, but other friends joined the conversation and provided me with valuable feedback.
So, the next time you can’t get an answer from someone in your company, try posting your question to your social networks. You may be surprised by the amount of great responses that you receive. However, getting internal approvals is a whole other story
What about you? What do you do when you can’t get an answer from someone internally? Feel free to share your comments below.
A great post! Am suffering from this very problem at present so some excellent advice here.
Hi Martin,
Thanks for the comment! Yes, sometimes you have to find other ways to get information when a deadline is approaching and you can’t get in touch with your usual sources.
Rachel