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.

在线问答已经成为人们查找信息的一种非常普遍的方式，并且通过社交网站发送即时消息为公司和个人提供了新的机会，使他们可以更私密地接触信息。尽管社交即时消息传递非常流行，但对于社交即时消息传递请求如何影响所接收的响应的了解甚少。这项研究通过报告一项关于社交即时消息的随机对照研究提供了新的贡献，其中我们将基本要求“我应该看侏罗纪世界”沿四个轴分为16个变体：标点符号，句子数，范围和表情符号可用性，并将请求发送给160个陌生人。测量了答复率，速度和感知答案的有用性，表明95％的问题得到了答复，一分钟内收到55％的回复，而22％被认为是有用的。我们还从统计角度调查了与这四个维度相关的哪些因素可能会影响答案的有效性。结果表明，如果将一个请求用明确的问题用“？”表达，则发给特定的被访者“ you”，并带有友好的表情符号，则很有可能收到有用的回复。讨论了理论和实践意义。