How should brands incorporate Questions into a Facebook marketing strategy?

As online recommendations now stand among the most trusted forms of advertising, according to Nielsen, Facebook’s new tool offers up exciting opportunities for brands looking to maximise their Facebook marketing plans.

Following a year of beta testing, Facebook Questions finally rolled out globally on Facebook on March 24. The market research and crowdsourcing potential is vast, as companies can tap into real-time feedback from known fans in a trusted setting.

Brands should now ponder whether to leverage the tool similarly to other Q&A sites such as Yahoo Answers, Quora and LocalMind, or to create a novel social media strategy.

Over at Mashable.com, Ben Grossman, communication strategist for Oxford Communications broke down the key differences between the sites’ functionality.

While Facebook Questions falls into roughly the same category as the aforementioned sites, there are two major differences; answers to questions are not free-form; users are limited to multiple-choice responses; questions (and their answers) are not yet catalogued by search engines, he explained.

The upshot is that for now, public Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers and Quora will remain important for public-facing customer support and inquiries.

Grossman went on to detail a major perk of Facebook Questions over existing ‘poll applications’- no pesky boxes for users to click permitting access to their data.

It also features a useful function that allows users to add more options to multiple-choice answers. The potential to learn from consumers here is exciting, but only if brands get their questions right.

One word of warning to brands thinking of using Questions to gauge public opinion: that feedback will then be visible to hordes of Facebook users. Failure to act on or respond to opinions will be called upon. Questions even includes a nifty comment area proving a platform for consumers to do just that.