To develop your visibility and brand authority, answering to questions people from your niche are asking is a great strategy. There are social platforms specializing in connecting people that have questions with experts that have answers. Quora is one of them. It is a great place to share your knowledge on any subject, learn more about a topic and develop your brand authority.
What is Quora?
Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users.
Quora is thus a great marketing tool because:
- You receive exposure of 1,5 million monthly visitors
- You can show your expertise on a subject
- You get advice from top experts
- You can access direct answers to your questions
- You can share content from external sources and your website on your profile
Quora main features
Your profile
The first thing to do after signing up is to create your profile. You need to fill out these information as if you want to establish yourself as an expert, you have to introduce yourself as one of them. Take the time to be descriptive and informative about what you do, who you are and what your key topics are.
Click on your name in the top menu bar. Then pick ‘Profile’ and ‘Edit’ to add your headline and profile content.
Don’t forget to include links to your social accounts or website. This will help develop referral traffic to your website from Quora.
Finding and following topics
Now that you have created your profile, you will want to start following topics. You can use keywords in the search box to look for topics. The platform is based on suggestions so you will easily find extra topics based on what you enter.
Topic pages first display an overview of the best subjects related to the topic.
The topic pages start out with the latest boards and questions.
If you follow the topic, you will get the latest activity on your home page feed. You can also set up via the Settings section to receive by mail the latest questions.
You can also directly subscribe to any topic by adding /rss to the URL. If you used a search query to find the topic, just strip off the ?q=keyword from the end of the URL before adding the /rss. For Google, the URL for the topic is http://www.quora.com/Google and the URL for the RSS feed is http://www.quora.com/Google/rss.
Beneath the top questions and subscription options, you can find the latest activity on the topic, “most viewed writers”, and the people following the topic.
You can thus easily connect with other experts or people interested in your subject. Just click on ‘Followers’ in the ‘About section’ and you will see every person following the topic.
Describe your topic experience on your profile
Once you have followed the topics you are interested in, you can go back to your profile and click on them.
For each topic, you can edit the experience you have related to the subject. This is a good way to present your expertise regarding each topic.
When you will respond to a question related to a topic, the description you picked will be displayed alongside the answer. If you leave that space empty, your general bio will show up.
How to use Quora as a reputation management and customer service?
You can use Quora to spot discussions about your brand. This is great to identify what people think about a brand or a product. You can collect insights, feedbacks from people you did not know.
You can thus join the conversation and directly answer to enquiries. You can also find new prospects and new sales opportunities as people are often comparing different concurrent products. Be sure to have prepared your marketing pitch! This is a relevant way to highlight your key features / products / metrics, etc.
You can also start submitting your questions and answers.
Add questions
Asking questions is useful if you want to know more about your target audience. You can directly ask your questions from the main search bar and then add tags to ease identification.
You can also request answers from other experts. The members suggested are usually top influencers in the topic. But you can still look for other people.
Here for instance, we are requesting feedbacks about our crawler. This is a great way to collect new insights about your product. When someone replies, be sure to upvote their answer to show your interest or even leave a comment.
Add answers
It is now time to show your expertise! They are many questions waiting for answers or additional details in the topics you are following. Simply click on ‘Answer’ to add your expertise to the conversation. This is great to grow your brand visibility ( you should display your brand name alongside your bio) and set your brand as a reference.
You can tag other questions, topics, and Quora users in your answer using the @ symbol. You can add images from your hard drive or using an image URL from the web. If you have a supporting link to add to your answer, just paste the full URL in and it will be automatically hyperlinked. This is a great way to promote your own blog content, products, or services if they are relevant to your answer. Don’t purely promote your brand, it will be seen as spammy by the community but answer to questions with branded content if it is only relevant and useful.
Create your blog
You can create your own blog and share content with your audience.
Click on your profile picture and then ‘Blog’. You have the ability to create a blog.
You can start adding content and even add authors to also contribute.
You can choose to allow anyone to add content to your blog. Start building your expertise by creating unique content or curating content you have already written on your blog.
Marketing benefits of using Quora
As you can see, Quora has a great marketing potential:
- You can introduce yourself in your profile section and link back to your website so people that are interested in who you are can visit your website.
- Follow topics in your industry and build your reputation by answering to questions. Include content to your blog when relevant to increase brand visibility.
- Connect with people sharing your interests and find new prospects.
- Create or contribute to blogs to develop your authority and expertise.
- Ask questions that engage with the community to build your presence on the platform. Here is an overview of what received the most answers.
Have you used Quora for your marketing strategy? I would love to hear what worked the best for you.
