Good News for Page Owners
In the realm of Facebook Pages, one of the basic rules to keep fans engaged is to ask questions. Similar to real-life situations, likable people are those who constantly interact with their surroundings. They network with other people, see how they’re doing, ask questions, and gather feedback. Most Facebook Pages already have this covered, which is why it is so common to see companies asking questions, or using fill-in-the-blanks in their status updates.
The revamped Questions feature has a lot of customizable features that will definitely help Facebook Page owners engage more with their fans. When posting a question, page owners have the option to either create a poll with limited choices, or allow their fans to add answers of their own. The comment section is still there, so users are allowed to express follow up remarks in their own words. As fans respond to the polls, each option’s box fills up to reflect the number of people that picked that choice. This enables users to see and compare the popularity of each answer.
Moreover, the feature is always public; questions are posted on participants’ Faceboook profiles, allowing their friends to view the polls. This not only gives more exposure to the Facebook page that posted the question, it also opens the possibility for popular questions to become viral in the Facebook network, thus giving Page owners insights on communities outside their fan base.
On Individual Profiles
All in all, Facebook Questions can do wonders for companies and organizations that operate Facebook Pages. However, this new feature may not have much of an impact on individual Facebook profiles. When it comes to asking questions on the Internet, people already have their go-to Q&A websites, such as Quora and Yahoo Answers.
According to Mashable, Facebook plans to implement a “roulette-type feature that allows users to browse Facebook’s eventual mountain of Q&A.” Furthermore, users will be able to follow questions to receive notifications in case new answers come up. But can Facebook lure people’s curiosities out of Yahoo, Wikipedia, and the burgeoning Quora network? Let’s make a poll out of it, shall we?