Take it away blog.facebook.com:

“To help us show your question to the most relevant people and ensure the best answers, you can tag it with a specific topic. For instance, if you have a question about what type of camera you should buy, you could tag it with “Photography.” If you want to find the best bike routes in the area, you might tag it with “Cycling.”… The questions you ask will be shown to people who have expressed interest in the particular topics you tag.”

It’s a user-generated development; Facebook have spotted a pattern in usage – “Millions of people ask their friends questions on Facebook every day” says Blake Ross on the official Facebook blog – and have developed a feature reflecting that pattern.

Here are some Facebook Questions questions:

Has Yahoo! Answers come to mind yet? It’s a good example of the shortfalls of expecting answers from the internet. Wikipedia works because it’s moderated; will Facebook Answers be compromised by its open nature? Only time will tell. There’s been some discussion of Facebook Questions as a replacement for Google as the go-to for quick answers. Can the massed expertise of Facebook users rival Google’s algorithim? Answers in the comments please…

As the Guardian blog is quick to point out, there are big differences between searching on Twitter and searching via Google or other search providers. Twitter indexes very differently from Google’s Caffeine or the indexing algorithms used by other search providers.

So, Twitter and Google will deliver very different results. The helpful example given in the Guardian blog explains further:

“If I want to find out what people are saying about the World Cup right now, I might search Twitter… But if I want to find fixture lists, stadia capacity and previous tournament winners, I’m going to Google.”

So, Google, for example, will offer a much more sophisticated field of search results, whereas Twitter allows up-to-the-minute monitoring of conversations occurring across the social web (turning up Tweets containing links to posts on Posterous, Facebook pages, photographs on Tumblr, etc.)

Twitter’s Biz Stone, quoted in the Guardian article, is aware of this difference:

“Searching the web – …is about I, me, I’m asking the search engine to give me something – and when you are on Twitter, you are open to information that’s coming to you.”

That’s an important point of the argument; what search services deliver defines how people use them. People are increasingly search savvy. With Google integrating real-time results on to SERPs, would it be worthwhile for Twitter to try and offer a more sophisticated search? Answers in the comments please…

Implications? Well, the difference between visits to social and search sites isn’t exactly huge; social sites are currently 0.55% more popular than search engines when you compare percentage of total UK internet visits. Of course, every leading edge can be leveraged, and 0.55% of total UK internet visits is still a potentially significant amount of traffic. Search engines are still receiving 11.33% of total UK internet visits, a more than healthy amount.

While Facebook is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, there’s still no Google-equivalent amongst the social networks. Facebook’s share of social network visits is 55%. Whilst that’s impressive, it’s nowhere near the market domination that Google has achieved. Facebook is making some big steps interconnecting with other social networks, and diversifying its functions into areas like ecommerce. This latter development could have massive implications, but it’s still early days; we’ll be looking into it in more detail in a forthcoming blog.

Social network users are there to interact with each other and with organisations and brands. Hence the opportunities for brand exposure and customer relations that make social networks an important arena for businesses.

As surfing habits change, it’s important to redeploy your strategy where potential customers spend their time, whether that’s users looking for engagement on a social network, or within search engine results. More than ever, ensuring that there’s cohesion between your social strategy and your search strategy is important. There’s a need for a coherent brand message and targeting across both.

Twitter have put the first of their dedicated business-user features – rumoured since last year and following the launch of paid ads last month – into beta testing. A few lucky souls have been invited to trial the Business centre; one of them has decided to share some screenshots with mashable.com.

The features that will be available to Twitter Business Centre users are intended to improve Twitter’s usability as a customer relations and PR platform; Business Centre users will be able to receive direct messages from Twitterers they don’t follow, and will also be able to add multiple users to one account.

These tweaks should make Business Centre Twitter profiles more flexible tools for dealing with customer enquiries, and increase the reaction-speed of damage-limitation public relations. Twitter is increasingly a tool for consumer campaigning; these Business Centre features indicate that Twitter fully understands the needs of their commercial users, and what they use their social media profiles for; speedy communication and flexible reaction.

There is, however, no word as yet on the access to “stats” that, according to statements made by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone last year, will eventually be made available to business users. Being a measurement-focussed agency, we’re more than a little bit interested in what these stats will include, especially seeing as Biz Stone has expressed the desire to provide users with “some of the analytics” related to their Twitter accounts.