Quora just turned 10 and it can be a little hard to imagine that someone might be oblivious to it.
For anyone asking what Quora is, let’s say it is a platform where anyone can ask and answer questions. And the community votes on which answers are the most helpful. It’s a pretty cool place if you know your way around! It’s where when you ask an SEO question, Rand Fishkin can answer, or someone can ask a question about playing basketball with the president and Barack Obama can hop into the thread.
Sounds fun and all, but how does Quora fit in with marketers? Quantcast estimates nearly 775,000 people access Quora each month in the U.S. alone, a significant audience of curious, well-intentioned knowledge-seekers.
For marketers, there are a plethora of reasons why Quora might be worth considering. For instance, you can gain exposure to Quora’s 700,000+ monthly visitors, discover questions that people are asking about your industry, learn from industry experts, customers and users, and establish authority and expertise in your niche on your chosen topics.
With over 300 million monthly users scouring Quora at any given moment, here’s how marketers can make the most of Quora to reach out to them:
1. Build up Your Quora Profile
Once you have signed up on Quora or connected via Twitter or Facebook, you have to create a profile before you can begin. What is the purpose of flaunting your industry expertise and getting exposure if people find nothing about you when they visit your profile? To setup or edit your profile, click on your name in the top menu bar, go to Editlinks to add profile content and a catchy headline. Be sure to include links to your main social accounts or business website to channel traffic from Quora to your website.
2. Track topics with notifications
Quora offers a plethora of benefits to businesses, but perhaps the best is that it offers you market research. Now, you can discover what people are asking about your industry and what their pain-points are. And you can have those queries as well as answers provided by other users sent directly to your inbox every day. For a start, simply type the topic you’d like to follow into Quora’s search box. Quora will provide a list of autocompleted suggestions, and on clicking through to a topic page, you’ll be presented with an extra list of related topics to follow.
You can even follow individual users who offer meaningful content and be notified of their newest answers. For blog posts, you can look up the author or the blog name and follow the blog to receive updates for any future posts. If you don’t want to miss any updates from Quora, be sure to check if your email notifications are set up properly. For this, visit your Settings page and click on Email & Notifications. This page allows you to control the specificity and frequency of the emails you receive from Quora. Not to mention, your home feed will be filled with the greatest and the latest from the blogs, people, and topics you are following.
3. Use Quora’s Ad Platform to Find Questions
If you want to be viewed as an expert in your field, why not invest the time in crafting useful answers to the questions people post in your niche. This is one of the best ways of driving traffic to your site through Quora. However, the amount of traffic you can expect to generate through answering a question on Quora isn’t always certain. Luckily, there are a few in-built tools you can leverage to make accurate conjectures.
Think of Quora as a new source of intent. Quora is equally rivaling AdWords as the best source of high-intent leads. The fact that it is fully dependent on user-generated content, with real-time answers, makes it the best digital hang-out for marketers. Even if you are not looking to launch a paid campaign yet, you can still find new questions to answer and garner a ballpark estimate of their revenue potential via numerous tools.
To get started, set up a Quota Ad account and launch a dummy campaign. Quora’s advertising platform is unique in the way it targets its ads to users. For research purposes, Question Targeting is your go-to tool. Within the targeting section of your campaign, select ‘Topic Targeting’ from the Primary Targeting tab. Enter your desired keywords in the dialogue box that pops up. Add all the keywords pertaining to the questions you’d like to answer. This will give you a list of the relevant questions on Quora, along with their answers and average weekly views.
4. Submitting Questions & Answers
After you’ve followed your favorite topics, you can start submitting questions and answers right away.
Adding Questions
A great strategy that many marketers use to find out about their target market in detail is to add questions to question and answer networks. Once you have selected an appropriate topic, click on the Add Question button.
Answers will come pouring. Be sure to click on the Upvote and Thank link beneath each answer to let people know you valued their help and found it useful. If you have to wait endlessly for answers, why not capitalize on the ‘Ask to Answer’ system to ask a specific Quora member to answer your question. The platform will only reveal the top answerers in that topic.
The users suggested are usually the top answerers in that topic. You can find people by search or view more suggestions. This is a great way to draw more attention to your questions!
Adding Answers
Are you an expert in your niche? Time to flaunt your expertise and start answering questions. Click on a specific question in a topic you are following, head over to the Add Answer box, and answer to the best of your abilities.
Quora allows you to tag/link to other Quora users, topics, and questions in your answer using the @ symbol. You can also supplement your answer with relevant images, either drawn from the web or from your hard drive. You can even add supporting links to your answers which would help the user further. Simply paste the full URL and it will be automatically hyperlinked. You can use this feature to promote your own services, products, or blog posts if they pertain to your answer. However, only do so if it fits naturally. Quora users are quick to spurn spammy content.
5. Connect with other Quora users
Quora is so much more than a search engine; it is a social media platform. This entails you to be “social”. When Quora is used with marketing in mind, don’t overlook the importance of engaging with potential customers and leads. Like most social channels, Quora lets users communicate with other people directly. This is a great news for brands looking to nurture personalized relationships with customers. Who knows, you might even stumble upon questions people have asked about your company or service. Who better than a leading employee of your business or the founder to answer them?
Find people to connect with by:
- Sharing content outside of Quora linking back to your solutions in the platform
- Creating and contributing to boards that cover topics in your industry
- Tracking the top followers and answers of relevant topics
Quora can also be used to address any queries or concerns posed by your customers. In fact, Sprout Social data asserts that 55% of people call out to brands to get a meaningful resolution or a response to their queries. Find mentions of your brand and try to respond in person. The more value you give, the more easily you convey unhappy clients into loyal advocates.
6. Support your Quora answers
The most winning answers on Quora are backed by references, sources, and statistics – specific, concrete details that back up your argument. Personal stories prove to be the best answers but require much more time to develop.
For each figure or fact, link to the reference source. If you’ve already published a white paper, blog post, or social media post containing this info, link back to it to boost your traffic even more!
7. Write Valuable Content
Akin to content marketing, you cannot hope to be successful on Quora until you provide value to readers. As you browse around the site, keep in mind that quality has precedence over quantity. Given the vast number of questions you could expertly answer, don’t be tempted to reply to all, ruining the quality in turn.
This is especially true if you adopt the mindset that each answer offers an opportunity to link to your site. However, keep in mind that Quora is already full of content, packing a repository of answers to all the popular questions in your industry. So, unless you really are an expert in a niche industry and can offer them something that others can’t, stick to questions where your expertise can actually provide value.
When you feel at a loss for choosing which questions to answer, evaluate the following six attributes:
- A question with inadequate or unsatisfactory answers making yours more likely to stand out.
- Relevant to your bio offer.
- An emotional pull. This would enable you to write more genuine answers with thought-provoking stories.
- A question you can supplement with a personal image to complement.
- A lot of followers, but many bad answers.
- 7:1 ratio of followers to the number of answers provided.
Simply penning down surface-level content in bulk isn’t going to take you anywhere. Focus on one question at a time and peruse through the existing answers to make sure you add something new to the conversation instead of re-stating the points that others have made earlier. Try to find a question with inadequate answers or see if you could provide a new angle on a popular question and start typing! You might find this intimidating if you are new to Quora. To get started, it is a great idea to look for popular answers related to the topics you want to write about and make sense of the formatting and style used by other users like you. While you don’t have to copy the approach of other writers, knowing the general public preference can give you a solid ground to build your marketing foundation on.
8. Sharing Content on Boards
Wish to organize your favorite answers, questions, or collect information that you find useful from other sites on your Quora profile? This is where Quora boards come in. To get started, visit your profile, look for the field to Create a New Board somewhere beneath your Followers – Following strip. Craft a title of your board and click the Create button to start adding content to it or allow submissions from other users.
Click the Add to Browser button to add a Post to Quora bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar or grab it from the resources page. If you want to post content from some other site onto your board, click on the Post to Quora bookmarklet. A pop-up window will appear, asking you to specify whether you want to add the link to your own board or someone else’s that is open to outside contributions.
This helps you promote outside content to Quora users, especially your blog posts or other content pieces. You can even add links to your outside content on your board and tick off the Share with Followers checkbox to make sure your followers are notified of the post.
To add existing user-generated content from Quora to your board, such as an answer or an important question, just click the Repost link. With the help of the right resources on and off Quora, you can create a very comprehensive board on any topic on Quora to help people looking for in-depth answers and enhance your fan following.
9. Build a Quora page for your business
If you are familiar with how Wikipedia works, Quora works along similar lines. You can create a page about anything on Quora. This feature can be smartly used to build a company page for your business. to get started, search for your business’s name in Quora. If the name is not already listed as a topic on the results page, you can look in the right sidebar underneath the “Add Question” box and click on “Create Topic.” Input the name of the topic and add a brief description. Get your topic live and ask the Quora community to review the topic. For businesses, it is a great idea to add a bit of social proof and testimonials to your brand’s presence on Quora.
