At the Social Venture Network conference there were lots questions floating around about social media, but the one that seemed to keep coming up was: “how do I get new fans and keep them interested?” One of the successful method in the race for engagement on Twitter and Facebook has been to develop fun, creative and relevant viral tools for your fan community. This could be an application, widget, survey, poll or quiz. A great start would be to conduct the low impact exercise in developing your first Facebook quiz or poll with Quiz Creator or PollDaddy.

Just remember to ask yourself several questions before jumping in: How does this fit in with your content strategy and your brand? Who do you want to reach? What information do you want to share? What information do you want your fans to share? What can you do to encourage them to share it with their friends? Remember: It has to be fun, authentic and on brand.

NYTimes Gadgetwise: How to Create a Facebook Quiz
Quiz Creator makers LOLApps help with the instructions and we’re taking the liberty of reprinting them here:

STEP 1: Login to your Facebook account. Scroll to the bottom of the page. Click the Applications tab in the lower left corner. On the menu that pops up, click Browse More Applications at the bottom.

STEP 2: On the page of apps, there’s a Search Apps box near the upper left corner. Use that the box to search for the app Quiz Creator. I picked Quiz Creator because it’s simple to figure out and has fewer steps than some of the other quiz creators.

STEP 3: Click the Quiz Creator application. On the next page that appears, click the button Go To Application in the upper left corner. Another page will appear to ask you to allow the application to access your personal data. Click Allow. Finally, you’ll get to the page where you start creating the quiz.

STEP 4: On the first page, you’ll be asked to enter some basic information about your quiz. Follow the prompts and enter your quiz name — for example, “What kind of dog are you?” Fill in a short description of the quiz. Upload a picture from your computer to illustrate your quiz.

STEP 5: Enter the results of your quiz — golden retriever, Labrador retriever, German shepherd, French bulldog — as well as the descriptions the quiz taker will see along with their results. Follow the prompts to upload a picture to accompany each result.

STEP 6: Enter the questions for your quiz, and pair the answers with the desired result. For example:
Questions: What is your favorite food?
Answer: Anything – Labrador retriever
Answer: Caviar – poodle
Answer: Steak – German shepherd
Answer: Kibble – golden retriever

STEP 7: Click Next. This takes you to a page with a giant button: Install the Developer App. That pops open a new page. Click Allow. This is where the going gets tricky. Facebook requires lots of clicks to create the actual quiz application.

STEP 8: Go back to the previous page, where there’s another giant button: YES, I have the Developer App. Click that.

STEP 9: Take a deep breath. Exhale. You’re going to need to follow a bunch of instructions to pop up a bunch of windows. Some of them will direct you to yet other windows. The goal is to get some long, gibberish-to-you but important-to-the-computer text strings from one window, and paste them into another. Why do you even have to do that? I don’t know. Facebook isn’t the greatest at user interfaces, and it suffers as a result. Many people will abandon the process here rather than hang in there. You’re a Gadgetwise reader, though, so make me proud and curse this multi-window authentication process even as you complete it. But after a half dozen windows with instructions written by a software developer, asking you to please be patient type this into that window, you’ll suddenly have a page with your quiz displayed on it.

STEP 10: The final step in the quiz creation process requires you to invite one or more Facebook friends to try your quiz. Now you know why you get so many of them.