Facebook Questions: Not a Fan of Fan Pages
Facebook has rolled out another update. Honestly, this one will not likely have a big effect on the Adult Industry. I am even arguing with myself about how this update will impact the Adult Industry because it is generally irrelevant to Fan Pages at present. But here’s the latest: Questions has been unleashed on the Facebook world.
Questions is a new feature that allows you to create a poll to post in your status update. You can ask any question, then add as many answer options as you wish for responders to choose from. The “options” are your poll choices. You can even offer “Allow anyone to add options” to let people write in their own answer, if they do not want to choose one of your pre-sets.
Everyone likes polls. Everyone likes quizzes. There are more quiz applications on Facebook than almost any other kind of app. Why? Because we are dorks and love answering questions about whether we think we’re going to survive the next Zombie Apocalypse. Of course, quizzes and polls are also a great way to crowdsurf ideas. There are reasons why Survey Monkey is so popular.
Crowdsurfing is a great way to include your audience in your decisions. For Kim Kardashian, crowdsurfing is integral to her business strategy. Where Questions has the potential to be a boon for crowdsurfing Twitter, it is currently a big #FAIL because of its limitations with Fan Pages.
This is what Questions looks like when you are creating a poll:
When you create a poll, it appears in your newsfeed and on your wall.
If you have a personal Profile and you post a Question, it looks like this:
In the newsfeed the Question appears as the full poll, showing profile thumbnails of people who have answered.
If you post a Question from your Fan Page, it looks like this:
When you post a Question from your Fan Page, it shows up as a link instead of showing the poll.
As you can see, there is a big difference between how Questions appear on the newsfeeds and walls for Fan Pages and Profiles, and there is an obvious benefit to posting as a Profile. Because it shows up as a link instead of a preview to the poll, the usefulness for Fan Pages has been generally negated.
If someone does actually click through and answer the question, it will show up as activity in their news feed (as either the link or the post – Facebook is still testing this). For now, the Fan Page link situation is inhibiting the use of this feature as an interactive business tool. Maybe Facebook will change it as they work out some of the kinks.
In any case, if you’d like to try out this interesting new feature, get Facebook Questions.
Make sure to check out Wednesday’s post on Crowdsurfing for the Adult Industry.
