“For most of these questions, experts weren’t going to be the best source for advice,” said Adrian Graham, product manager, Facebook Questions. “For more unusual questions, you can get advice from a broader group of people, but to keep it most relevant we filter the answers to show you first what your friends think.”

“Facebook Targets Creatives” via Warc. Following up on last week’s Facebook Studio post.

Since Yahoo Answers became an abyss for real insight, a need has existed for a more intelligent online Q&A site. The frontrunner in this race for better answers to better questions has been Quora. Quora exists as a curiosity network with an answer refining community. Mainly, it is a place to collaboratively seek and provide expertise.

Aside from experts, there are two types of opinion and recommendation that people generally trust — majorities and friends. From Yelp to Amazon, almost any type of product or business has a wealth of reviews from hundreds or even thousands of users, establishing majority opinion across the web. The last in-demand side of the Q&A equation, friend opinion, has received an ideal platform.

Facebook Questions recently launched for both personal profiles and business pages. Whether it be for crowdsourcing, market research or just to drive engagement, Questions presents an opportunity for brands to finally poll fans naturally (without an app approval process). Like all Facebook tools, Questions comes with the largest built-in user base online. Users can “add an option” to these realtime polls and every time a user answers a question, it spreads to their newsfeed.

The open-ended, seamless feature is a step in the right direction for brands to become better friends with their fans by doing one simple thing: listening.

Not only does Facebook Questions serve a longstanding need to have a quality polling service available to marketers, it also offers the hard sought ability for brands to find out what their fans actually think.