Facebook unveiled the beta version of its new Q&A feature, Questions, on Wednesday. Questions appears as “Ask Questions” on the website, though it is not available to all users at this point. The new Facebook product feature taps into the collective knowledge of its half a billion users to create a more social version of Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia and is a great example of how to add new product features.
Whether you want to figure out what camera to buy or the name of song in a commercial, Facebook Questions can help you out. Users can utilize existing Facebook features, such as images or polls, to help frame their questions. “Want to know what type of flower is growing in your back yard? Take a photo and attach it to the question,” says Blake Ross, director of product management at Facebook.
Facebook Questions will incorporate tags to organize questions and answers. For instance, if you want to learn more about a state politician you would browse in the politics category and to see how the answers evolve, users can “follow” a question, much like a brand. As the new feature becomes accessible to the broader internet audience, Facebook’s Questions could be stiff competition for Yahoo Answers! and the re-focused Ask.com.
In general, adding new features can increase your overall product value and consequently, increase your market share. To help you build new features to improve your products overall value, you will need to:
- Perform market research: Get the facts and learn about your audience (tips on market analysis). Facebook is aware that Q&A sites, such as Yahoo! Answers, receive a significant traffic. In fact, Yahoo! Answers has 28 million average in monthly traffic, Ask.com has 50.2 million and Aardvark 19.5 million (recently acquired by Google), according to Quantcast.com. Combined, that is nearly 100 million users that “like” Q&A. Seems like a prime opportunity to me.
- Evaluate your current product offering: understand the value you bring to the market, and any gaps. Facebook discovered a gap: there is increased market attention to digital solutions that answer questions (as discussed in our Ask.com analysis).
- Stretch your creativity: pursue continual innovation (see our tips on innovation). Facebook continues to roll out new features including Facebook Connect, apps, mobile sharing, etc.
- Make sure it’s in-line with the product: every new feature must make sense. For Facebook, its user-base already comments, shares and uploads content to friend profiles. Adding a Q&A section follows the same process, although users do not necessarily interact with others within their network. Instead, they call upon experts in the respective field (remember the camera example).
- The numbers must add up: weigh the value created by the new feature and the cost of producing it (see Sparxoo’s financial management services). In the first quarter of this year, Facebook surpassed Yahoo! as the online display advertising market leader with 176 billion display ad impressions, which represented more than 16 percent of the market, reports InformationWeek.com. Keeping users on the site with additional features, like Questions, will increase pageviews and ultimately Facebook’s profit.
Read more about adding new product features here.
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