Customer questions on social media: a question bank

Short answer

To learn which questions people ask about your product category, add category terms — not your brand name — to your monitoring, paired with question forms: "how to choose", "which is better", "how much", "when should I replace". Sort the questions you find into six types and collect them in a question bank: the question itself, its different wordings, how often and by how many different authors it was asked, which stage the buyer is at, and where your answer lives. The bank feeds your FAQ, product pages, sales scripts and customer service replies.

Why category questions

Questions about your brand come from people who already know you. Questions about the category show where the market still has no answers: what people do not understand, what they fear, what they compare. For a company selling water filters, "can you drink Baku tap water without a filter?", "when should the cartridge be changed?" and "does reverse osmosis remove useful minerals too?" never mention the brand, yet they reveal the biggest obstacles to a sale. A company that answers them clearly earns trust, even if the buyer does not buy today.

How to build the query

1. 1Category termsGeneric names of the product and service: "water filter", "reverse osmosis", "cartridge". Separately for each language: Azerbaijani, Russian and, where useful, English.
2. 2Question forms"how", "which", "why", "how much", "when", "can I", "is it worth", "what's the difference". In Russian: «как», «какой», «стоит ли», «в чём разница».
3. 3Combine themCategory term + question form. A category term alone brings lots of noise; a question form alone finds everything.
4. 4SourcesSector forums, family and home discussion sites, Q&A sections, comments under news stories.

Six question types

• Understanding: "what is reverse osmosis?" — they do not understand the category itself.
• Choice: "which filter for a home?" — they do not know the criteria.
• Price: "how much is a decent filter?", "what's the monthly service fee?" — looking for a budget range.
• Risk and doubt: "can a filter make water harmful?" — fear or misinformation.
• Use: "can I change the cartridge myself?" — the post-purchase experience.
• Comparison: "filter or bottled water?" — weighing alternative solutions.

A question-bank template

One row per question. The columns:

• Question — in its clearest wording, as you have edited it.
• Variants — how people actually write the same question (two or three sample quotes, with links).
• Type — one of the six types.
• Frequency — how many times it was found in the last 90 days, and by how many different authors.
• Stage — curiosity, choice, purchase, use.
• Where answered — FAQ, product page, blog post, sales script; or "nowhere".
• Owner — who writes and updates the answer.

Where the answer should live

• Understanding and risk questions — a blog post or a detailed FAQ: they need explanation.
• Choice questions — a comparison table or a buying guide on the product page.
• Price questions — state the price range openly; a hidden price breeds suspicion.
• Use questions — instructions, a short video, a ready reply for customer service.
• Comparison questions — an honest comparison piece; a comparison that only praises your own product is not believed.

Finding the gaps

The most useful column in the bank is "where answered". Questions with high frequency and no answer are your content and sales gap. Sort them by frequency and write answers for the top five. Questions that have an answer but are still asked often point to a different problem: the answer cannot be found, or it is not clear.

Illustrative example

This is an illustrative example. A chain of nurseries tracks "nursery" plus question forms for three months. The bank collects 40 questions. The three asked by the most different authors: "from what age should a child start nursery?", "how long does settling in take?" and "what's on the menu?". The website had only prices and addresses. The chain adds a piece on settling in, a sample weekly menu and its admission rules by age; its managers get a short script so they answer the same questions the same way on the phone.

Refresh rhythm

Update the question bank once a month: add new questions, refresh the frequencies, mark the ones now answered. Once a quarter, check: did a question become rarer after the answer was written? If not, the answer's location or wording needs to change. Flag seasonal questions separately — questions about air conditioning rise in summer, school questions in September.

Common mistakes

• Collecting only questions about the brand.
• Writing questions down without quotes and links — they cannot be checked later.
• Confusing the number of posts with the number of authors.
• Building the bank and never writing answers.
• Forgetting Russian-language discussions.

Limitations

Public discussions do not represent the whole market: people who post on forums are more active and often more worried users. So question-bank frequency should not be read as market share — it shows direction. When answering medical, legal or financial questions, a specialist review is needed; monitoring only finds the question.

Combine it with your own channels

Questions in public sources come from people who have not written to you yet. Compare the same bank with the questions in your chats and calls: those that appear in both places matter most. To tell which stage a buyer is at, you can use the scale in buyer intent in social comments.

Questions in Vexvon Monitoring

Vexvon Monitoring searches the sites you add for category terms and shows each post's type — including "question". Every result gets up to five short topic tags and its language is recorded, which makes grouping questions by topic and language easier. Exact-phrase mode helps find combinations such as "how to choose". You can export results to Excel and use them as raw material for the question bank. More on the Vexvon Monitoring page.

Next step

This week, write 10 category terms and 10 question forms, collect the first 30 questions from the last three months of public discussion into the bank and fill in the "where answered" column. The first five empty ones are next month's content plan. Other articles are in the buyer intent and customer needs section; to try it with your own category, get in touch.