Digital Trends:
Why Brands Should Use Facebook Questions
Facebook released its new “Questions” feature last week, allowing brands and publishers to solicit feedback from their community in an organized fashion that brands should utilize on a regular basis.
As compared to general Q&A sites like Quora or LinkedIn’s Answersfeature where users typically ask open-ended questions (“what do you think about the new iPhone?”), Facebook Questions focuses on soliciting recommendations from the community customized by Administrators. Brands create polls with either restricted questions or they can allow the community to create customized answers.
Why This is Important:
- Brands get to craft answers relevant to market research. Instead of a wide open call for response (“what do you think?”) brands can now provide specific polling style answers to questions. But allowing the community to add their own answers is a key build on polls. For instance, if a brand says, “which flavor of our health bars do you prefer?” a community member may add a fifth flavor of a bar where the brand has only provided four. Essentially, Questions allows for organized crowd sourcing that can expedite a brands’ R&D.
- Users don’t need to give permissions. Users answer or add questions whether or not they’ve signed up with a third-party application (as is often required by other polling apps).
- Questions Will Spread. Questions posted to your wall will also show up in the News Feed of users who have ‘liked’ your page. Brands can demonstrate their willingness to engage with consumers while doing market research that can turn viral.
In the spirit of Questions, try out this new feature and email me back at johnchavens AT porternovelli DOT com to tell me:
1) Questions is a helpful tool and we’re getting unique feedback.
2) Questions is redundant from the community management work we’re doing.
3) Questions has helped increase ‘likes’ for our community.
4) (Your question here).