So you’ve put up a shiny Facebook fan page for your business, you tweet on a regular basis and you wait to be seen but visitors’ feedback and inquiries are still poor. It’s time to have professional tools for this task. Online forms and surveys generally bring very good payoff in gathering visitors’ feedback on regular webpages and work wonderful on social media too. There are some useful web services that help putting those fields together.

The two pluses you will need are a contact form for your Facebook fan page and maybe a survey to spice up the looks of your profile and engage users in a fun topic. If you are inspired and wish to put ideas into practice, you may miss the development capabilities on regular HTML sites. But there’s nothing to worry about thanks to latest generation apps. Contact me, Formulario info, Kontactr and 123ContactForm are some of those which can help you have all the functionalities that come with forms and surveys right on your social media page.

“Right, but I can do it myself”, you may say. Well, you can try coding them but it’s a real distressing job. For publishing forms and surveys on Facebook fan pages you really need a web form builder that allows you to add HTML (and JavaScript) content, since iFrame app has replaced the old static FBML. What you will have is a separate tab with your form or survey. As for posting forms directly on your Facebook profile, this is quite a workaround task for the moment, but you can share the form link and have users open it that way.

On Twitter, things are simpler. You just post the link to the form so that it’s public and, optionally, you syncronize tweets to announce submissions. Of course, the topic should be of great interest, in order to keep people following your updates.

To land on both feet, you can integrate your forms and surveys with 3rd party apps for putting up mailing lists, keeping track of form users or displaying the submitted data directly on your website. Sky is the limit!

 Reasons for using forms and surveys on social media:

1. A well composed survey feeds users with the feeling their oppinion is respected.

It may also become a mean of entertainment by itself. Just imagine combining the power of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in one. You put some insightful questions in your survey, publish it on your Facebook page, make a share on LinkedIn and tweet submissions. Result? You get maximum exposure and keep users counting down until the result bursts in. Oh, and you also get data for your research on the first place.

2. Facebook forms are a good way to capture leads for sales.

“Fill in our form to get the special offer of the day!” can be your key message. This is a priceless addition to your product’s showcase, as it brings you contacts that you can use later for your marketing campaigns.

3. Forms and surveys are fun enhacements to use along with/instead of complex apps and games.

If you don’t have the time or resources to develop a dedicated gamelike app for your fan page, you can always have a cool and dynamic survey with images to go instead. People love taking part in picnic surveys and sharing them with friends. If the questions are fun or even hilarious you get an extra bonus of submitters. “What would you feed your fish with? a. Girlfriend’s 101st pair of shoes; b. Boss’s favourite pen; c. Justin Bieber!” – now that is going to create buzz around your page!

About the author – Laura Moisei

I’m a social media enthousiast and a totally engaged evangelist of 123ContactForm – online form and survey builder that helps users create professional Facebook forms. I like to keep in touch with the latest trends in online marketing and give advice to empower the image of businesses.