How social instant messaging questions affect replies: a randomised controlled experiment

Online Q&A has become a very common way for people to find information, and sending instant messages via social networking sites offers new opportunities for companies and individuals to reach out for information at a more private level. Despite the popularity of social instant messaging, little is known about how social instant messaging requests may affect the responses received. This study offers a new contribution by reporting a randomised-controlled study on social instant messaging, in which we phrased a basic request ‘Should I watch the Jurassic World' into 16 variants along four axes: punctuation, number of sentences, scope, and emoji availability, and sent the requests to 160 strangers. The response rate, speed and perceived answer usefulness were measured, indicating that 95% questions received replies, 55% of responses were received within one minute, and 22% were perceived as useful. We also statistically investigated what factors related to the four dimensions might influence the answer usefulness. The results showed that if a request was phrased as an explicit question with ‘?’, addressed to a specific respondent ‘you’, and accompanied with a friendly emoji , it was most likely to receive useful responses. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.