In response to sites like Quora, Yahoo Answers and the age old Ask.com, Facebook launched their Questions feature to all users on Mar 24th. This new feature, located in the status tool bar next to the option to add a link or a photo to a post, presents amazing opportunities for businesses of all kinds for not only fun quick interactions with their fans, but also, you guessed it market research.
Polls and questions are a great way to inspire fans to engage with your brand but if you’re at all like me, I’ll “X” out of an app download fast enough to make your head spin. The questions feature solves all these problems and more. It brings in people’s opinions without requiring much effort from them- which is exactly what fans want. While before, fans would have to think about their comment, draft verbiage and post it with their name and picture in full view, the questions feature only shows a small avatar if and only if your friends have voted. Other than that, you’ll only see the results. You even have the option to create your own answer, thereby opening up polling to places you may not have considered before.
Businesses can use this ad-on in a number of ways. Say you’re a frozen yogurt shop and you want to know which flavors to feature this week. Ask the fans. If you’re feeling especially ambitious, create some printed collateral driving traffic to your facebook url telling them to vote on the flavor of the week. If you’re a clothing store, ask what brands your loyal purchasers want to see more of. It could even be great for dentists trying to better know their target market or for political figure to better educate their following on certain issues. The possibilities are endless.
For Milwaukee Motorcycle Clothing Company, we asked: If you could only wear one thing…what would it be? In retrospect, this Q opened itself up to some sass from the start, but 148 votes, 12 followers and less than 24 hours later…we now know that biker fans love their smiles…before their boots and chaps. Great to know if they start to sell smiles…(tee hee).
Anyway, this new Facebook feature really enforces the basic concept of social media and that is that you’re there to learn and service your consumers. Get to know them. Give them what they want – content, humor, information or otherwise. If you listen to them…you’re well on your way to social media success.