Why you should ask your social media fan base for help

I stumbled across a really neat idea this week from the General Pants Facebook Fan Page wall….

The question they asked was simple.

When you’re looking at product images of their products, which do you prefer? A model wearing the outfit, or a mannequin?

It jumped out at me because I’m pretty passionate about eCommerce marketing and these little questions pop into my head all the time.

In the past, the only way you could have got an answer to a question like this was through time-consuming split testing; showing a product page with a mannequin wearing an outfit and comparing the conversion rate to a page with a model wearing the same thing.

Then there’s www.usertesting.com which, for $40 buck a pop, would also help you help you find the answer to this burning question. Pretty expensive.

I guess you could ask all your friends, but they’d probably stop liking you the second time you asked them.

The General Pants strategy is seriously clever stuff. They have an engaged community who are providing them answers to usability questions which will help their website sell more product. And they’re getting all this valuable insight for free.

And if they were really lucky, everyone would tell them a mannequin showing the outfit was best, and they’d save a fortune on talent!

Obviously this works best when you’ve got a large fan base, which is all the more reason to attract more fans.

There are literally dozens of questions you could ask, from, what users think of your new banner ad, or how they feel about your latest campaign idea, your home page design or colour scheme. The list goes on…

For the record, the answer was pretty resounding:

• 12 votes for both body and mannequin,
• 35 for body
• 1 vote for mannequin

Thanks for sharing General Pants! But it looks like you’ll need to keep spending on talent.

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.