Facebook has unveiled its highly anticipated Questions feature.
Facebook users among you may have noticed an additional option in your status bar, along side the ‘status’ tab.
Using the new feature, you can ask your friends questions to which they can respond to via a polling system.
For example, say you’re planning on going to the cinema, but you don’t know what to watch. You could ask the question, “I’m going to the cinema, which movie would you recommend?” and follow with a list of options. Like so;
Your friends could then vote and based on the feedback, you could make a decision.
Question and answer services are in no way a new concept, but it’s the ‘friend’ factor of Facebook that sets this tool apart from the likes of Quora and Yahoo Answers.
Facebook Questions project manager, Adrian Graham explained, “There are a lot of places you can go on the internet to ask questions of people who you don’t know, but there are very few places you can go to get responses from your friends.”
Questions gets really interesting when you consider how the tool could work with your Facebook brand page.
One of the most valuable aspects of a Facebook page is the ability to collect honest feedback from your fans or customers – what do they like about your product? what don’t they like about your product? Such information is worth it’s weight in gold.
Of course, page admins have always had the ability to ask their fans questions, but from an engagement point of view the average user is much more likely to spend 2 seconds clicking on a poll than they are making the effort to respond to an open question like, “How can we improve our services?”, or “What flavour should we introduce?”.
Ben Grossman of Oxford Communications said, “The best part about this is that it’s in a trusting, social and real-time setting. The opportunity to gain instant feedback from a brand’s biggest fans is amazing”.
We couldn’t agree more.
To add Questions to your Facebook page, if you haven’t already, follow these steps;
- Login to Facebook
- From your account tab, select ‘Use Facebook as Page’ and select the page you require
- Go to http://www.facebook.com/questions and select ‘Get questions now’
- Head back to your page and ask away!
