Facebook Questions
Looking for a better way to get answers? Facebook has a solution. This week Facebook has announced the launch of one of their newest applications, Facebook Questions. The purpose of this application is to give users access to the knowledge of the now 500 million people on Facebook. Facebook Questions is similar to Yahoo! Answers and Maholo.
Users have the option of posing questions to just their friends (similar to if they were posting on their wall), or to the entire Facebook community. From here, users can turn their question into a poll to get more feedback.
An example of a question for a poll might be “Which major city has the best nightlife?”
Users can tag a question to a particular topic or follow that topic for further feedback. Search features allow you to view previously asked questions and responses. Users can also rank answers as helpful or unhelpful. One important thing to remember: all content is public.
This application is slowly rolling out to all Facebook users, but from the few that have early access, there have been quite a few suggestions for improvement. Some suggestions include: easier publishing of questions to someone’s wall, and improving the search features so answers are easier to find.
Facebook Questions will likely become common place for users to seek advice and even product information. Although Facebook has made it quite clear that this is not meant to be a way for brands to advertise, in the future, brands with Facebook Pages will have the ability to respond to consumer questions. It will be interesting to see how brands will interact with consumers through this application. Will it be another means of two-way conversation?
