Cooking up personality quizzes that engage readers

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Let’s face it: we’ve all fallen victim to the online quiz. Which Kardashian are you? What Hogwarts house would you be sorted into? Which Fall Out Boy member should you go to prom with?

After years of dreading tests as students, why do we suddenly want to take every pop culture personality quiz that crosses our Facebook feeds?

Sociologists provide several explanations for why we enjoy these little Q&A sessions, and each can be used to directly impact the success of your food blog.

Reasons people love personality tests		How they can help improve your food blog
Personality tests meet our need to self-identify.		Get to know your readers better.
They give us something to talk about.		Use data to create more engaging posts.
They make us feel special.		Make readers feel special.
They affirm our self-image.		Encourage readers to identify with your blog.
They make us feel like part of a cozy social group.		Build a sense of community on your blog.

What ingredients go into a popular personality quiz?

Audience awareness

When you build your quiz, use what you know about your existing audience to develop the questions, answers, and most importantly, the results description. The results should reflect how your readers want to be perceived, so make them flattering and fun.

The quiz itself should be relevant to the interests of your blog’s readers. If you conducted a review of your audience using Twitter as we suggested in an earlier post, you may have discovered that you have a surprising number of sci-fi fans in your readership. Use that to your advantage with a title like:

Which starship crew should you be personal chef for?

If they’re into travel, you might try:

How daring are your food tastes on a scale of Bourdain to grumpy toddler?

Hint: If you’re going to have a less than flattering result, make the choices pretty obvious so that people don’t leave feeling insulted.

Simplicity

For your own sake and for your readers’, keep your personality quiz simple. Creating these tests is easy, but it can be time-consuming. Most internet users have a shorter attention span than a goldfish – seriously, science says so. So limit your questions to ten, tops.

Keep your language elementary and your question stems brief. These aren’t actual tests, and readers shouldn’t feel like they’ve taken a time machine back to their eighth grade Algebra class.

Variety

Make the options diverse and relatively obvious so that test-takers can easily identify themselves. Some people want to be a Hufflepuff. Others want to be a Slytherin. Give people a chance to self-sort. It’ll make them happier, and isn’t that the point?

If you enjoy making that first quiz and the results that you’ve gotten, follow up with others, but make sure that each is unique. No one wants to take the same test over and over. Unless you keep getting into Hufflepuff and you really want to be in Slytherin.

Images

Quiz engines like Qzzr, PlayBuzz, and Apester allow users to incorporate images, gifs, and sometimes even videos. Providing image-based options makes the quiz go faster because readers can process visual information more quickly than words. Plus, they’re more fun and more interesting than words alone.

Adaptability

Make sure that your quiz can be used on mobile devices as well as computers. Internet users are more likely than ever to access the internet via their phones and iPads than laptops and desktops. And a quiz is the perfect way to pass the time while you’re standing in a long grocery line.

Each of the quiz-building sites mentioned above has a free option for building quizzes as well as lists, surveys, and other interactive content. Each makes creating these items easy and fun. However, it’s a good idea to plan your quiz before you start building it. It saves a lot of time in the long run if you’ve got your resources together.