Facebook has introduced a beta version of a new feature called Facebook Questions. The new service formalises the procedure for posing questions to the site’s users and potentially lets you ask all 500 million of them.
Companies with Facebook accounts can also take advantage of the new feature and use Facebook Questions as a means to gain access to free focus groups. The new service allows both open questions to be posed and questions to be posed as polls, where a selection of answers are given. Users can also attach pictures to their questions.
When you ask a question, Facebook analyses it and sends it to the people it has judged most likely to know the answer. You can also tag questions by adding keywords which Facebook will then match to users who are interested in those subjects.
Questions you ask will also be propagated virally through your friend-base.
The questions, and their answers, will be available to anyone on the internet, but unlike Twitter, the questions and their answers will be grouped together and users will be able to browse a database of questions or even “follow” particular questions, in which case they will be updated every time a new answer is added.
The feature adds an “Ask Question” button to Facebook’s homepage, but you can also ask questions of individuals by posting a question on their profile page.
The availability of the social media Q&A service is limited for now but will eventually roll out to everyone.
