I enjoy helping people and sharing some of the things that I have learned about design and marketing. Twitter is a great tool for me to connect and share this with people. Sure, I can continue posting the interesting articles and resources I come across each week, but that’s just another form of broadcasting these days.

So I started looking at how to best answer questions on Twitter.

Answers Need Questions.

I have a great deal of information I can share and advice or opinions to share with people who want to hear it. Finding people asking the right questions was a little bit more difficult than I thought however. I attempted using the advanced Twitter search as well as some of the features available on TweetDeck, but nothing really worked for me.

What I needed was something that would help filter out the questions that didn’t interest me.

An Inbox Full of Questions.

I came across an interesting service called InboxQ. It allows you to create what it calls Campaigns, where you select specific words of phrases you want to see. You can then visit the website at www.inboxq.com and see a list of questions on Twitter that include your chosen words. You can modify your campaign at any time, or simply start another one if you want to split up certain topics.

Since I use the Chrome browser, I actually have the InboxQ plugin right in my menu. I am able to see if there are any questions for me to answer with a time stamp of how long ago the question was posted. I rarely feel the need to answer a question from 8 hours ago, but if it’s been 11 minutes I will likely go ahead and answer. It keeps track of the answers that I have provided, and even lets me know if someone began following me.

An Ingredient In Satisfaction.

There are many people that use Twitter to ask questions and most of them would prefer to get answers from businesses. Why? Because answers coming from businesses are generally higher quality.

By answering questions for people you can become a valuable resource. Demonstrating your experience and sharing your knowledge also helps keep you top of mind the next time a related dilemma presents itself. Serving people before they become a customer and starting to build that relationship can also help lead them to you down the line.

There Are Benefits to Taking The Time.

The largest benefit that comes from this is the number of quality followers that you gain. People are more likely to follow you and listen to what you have to say if you have offered them a helping hand. When first building up a following, this is a great way to start because InboxQ is catching all the questions of people who you are not actively following.

To help build up your network, show off some of what you know by answering the questions you have expertise in. Reciprocity can go a long way.