As of today Facebook is rolling out the Facebook Questions, a new feature that prompts Facebook users to ask questions
If you are on Facebook, you may have noticed a new publisher for personal accounts and pages alike with an icon that says “Ask Question.” From what we can tell it’s in Beta mode so if you haven’t seen it yet, you probably will soon. To see the dedicated page for Facebook Questions, go to http://www.facebook.com/questions/.
You can add a description, pictures and a poll to your questions. You can follow questions and get notifications if anyone answers them. It also appears that questions are either automatically categorized and if Facebook can’t determine the category, then the user is prompted to associate a keyword with the question. It looks like now you can browse and search for questions based on these category keywords. However, Facebook Questions isn’t a filter option in Facebook search. Also, all Facebook Questions are by default public – and can’t be changed to private.
Pages can also ask questions and get credit for it. As of right now the questions appear as stories in the News Feed however they disappear from Pages’ walls. I have a feeling this is going to change and is a glitch.
Allfacebook.com shares in a post “One other pretty impressive feature is that users who define interests within their profile will have questions surfaced to them based on that information. In other words, it functions identically to Quora which also has a questions based profile for users. Just like Quora, Facebook Questions also has the ability to “Follow” specific questions and receive updates any time someone submits a new answer.”
TechCrunch reported in a post that “Facebook will also be integrating Questions and their answers into the Community Pages that launched in April, which already include content from Wikipedia and Facebook user status updates. Finally, this is a big SEO opportunity for the site, though a Facebook spokeswoman said that there are no plans to include the content in search engines yet.” Facebook is definitely building an empire of information and data, leveraging its 500 plus million users.
The big question is what are the bigger implications of Facebook Questions? Does this directly compete with Google as the go-to source for all questions? Or is it more of a threat to Yahoo! Answers? Is this a better place for businesses to establish their expertise than on sites like LinkedIn which also has an Answers feature? Here’s our question – what do you think?
Post written by Helen Todd aka @helenstravels. To learn more from fbadz.com, connect with us on Facebook!