In the last month Facebook has released two new features – Questions and Places. Questions lets you post queries to the Facebook community and Places allows you to share your location with your Facebook friends.
While neither of these functions are new to the web, they are significant because of Facebook’s size. With 500 million users, the potential audience reach for both of these features is massive.
Facebook Questions
Facebook Questions was released in beta on July 28th and although it is currently only available to a limited number of people, Facebook says it is “aiming to bring this product to all of you as quickly as we can.”
Similar to Yahoo! Answers and LinkedIn Answers, Facebook Questions allows you to ask and answer questions within the Facebook community.
To ask a question, click on the “Ask Question” button at the top of the page. You can add a poll or photos to your question. For example, if you want to know the name of a flower that you took a picture of, you can attach the photo to your question. Questions also involve tagging. Users can tag their questions with keywords so that the questions can be found by people searching for questions on specific topics. Tagging also helps Facebook determine what users to show the question to.
Your question will appear to your friends as well as to people who have expressed an interest in that topic (determined by your tags) in their Facebook profiles. In terms of companies, if you post a question under your company profile, it will appear in your fans’ News Feeds.
Facebook Questions are also integrated into Facebook Pages. This means that fans can use the new Questions tabs to ask a question to the Page’s admin and other fans.
What Facebook Questions Means for Marketers
Facebook Questions can be used similarly to how businesses use LinkedIn Answers. We’ve worked with clients who’ve had great success with LinkedIn Answers as a networking and lead generation tool.
By answering questions under your company’s Fan Page, like using the Answers feature in LinkedIn, Facebook Questions can spread your name and the company around to people who you’re not friends with. This means more chances to make connections outside of your circle and more chances to establish yourself as an authority in your field.
Again, the significance of Questions is the size of Facebook’s user base. As Lisa Barone notes
Facebook Questions has something that the other Q&A sites don’t – your mom. I know it sounds like the punch line to a bad joke, but think about it. Your mother, your second cousin and your high school flame are all on Facebook. They use the site on a regular basis to re-connect with family and stay updated on baby photos. The fact that Facebook is built on relationships with people you know in real life changes the way people use it. It alters the types of responses we’re seeing being left on questions. If you take a look at the early responses being left on Questions, you’ll notice two things:
- The answers are much longer than on traditional Q&A sites.
- They’re more conversational.
Questions are becoming prompts for longer conversations. As a small business owner, you’ll get a much more expanded view of how people feel about a certain topic.
For further information on using questions and answers for marketing, Lisa Barone explains how to build authority through questions and answers.
Next: Part 2 – How To Use Facebook Places.
