Are Quora blogs right for your audience?

Quora is a question and answer platform that helps 300+ million people a month find information. All content on the website is user-generated, meaning it is created, edited, and organised by users.

Adam D’Angelo, the co-founder of Quora, believes the future of the internet is "creating more knowledge". Question-and-answer-based social platform Quora went live in 2010 and has gained popularity, as well as critical acclaim ever since, from the likes of the technical evangelist, Robert Scoble.

On 23 January, Quora launched its blogging platform. Quora is about providing high-quality information to relevant and engaged readers. Quora says active users get more than 30,000 monthly views, so Quora Blogs is an understandable move forward.

Quora wrote about its new blogging platform, claiming it is excellent for people who:

1. Don't have a significant, established online presence already
2. Don't want to do the time-intensive, heavy lifting of marketing their blog and slowly building an audience.

That platform allows people to follow topics that interest them, so a blogger can post about several different topics but still expect to see a dedicated and engaged audience for each one.

• Great for new bloggers who don’t have an extensive established online following already
• You don’t need to spend time marketing and building an audience
• Dedicated to mobile with a mobile text editor and optimised for mobile browsing
• Upvote system means blog posts can be re-discoverable
• Automatically distributes blog posts to relevant Q&A topics
• High engagement with votes and comments
• Established bloggers can re-post to expand their audience
• You can create as many blogs and blog posts as you like
• Great blog posts can go viral

Participating in both the blogs and the Q&A section can be valuable if your brand can provide expertise in a specific subject matter.

Quora blogs can also be valuable for brands wanting to provide informative content for their target audience without waiting for their target audience to visit their website.

Here you can see Eventbrite providing a helpful answer (back in 2011) about online ticketing, which highlights the helpfulness of the organisation while at the same time creating a little publicity about their proposition.

As in the example above, if the contribution is helpful, it will stand the test of time and remain in the Quora ether.

Matt Wurst, director of digital communities at 360i, claims that it can help if the brand is tied intrinsically to "one strong personality that has an expertise in a certain area".

Using Quora, brands can also find incredible value in listening to what is being said/asked about their brand and utilising the feedback as marketing research.

A note of caution, If you are considering using Quora, do be mindful of not making your promotional messaging too overt as Quora is hot on spam.

Yes, a lot has changed with Quora since the Q&A platform burst on the scenes. Businesses can have their own profile and use the website to create brand awareness. Learn more about business profiles on Quora.

With 300+ million users a month, there are excellent opportunities for businesses to reach relevant audiences.

Knowing who your audience/s are and whether they are using the platform is crucial before embarking on spending budget. 

The answer is, it depends. It could be. Quora contains answers to hundreds of thousands of questions. Many of the questions are purely hypothetical and (dare I say) posted by geeks, but many are relevant to a specific need.

If you are looking for answers to questions such as, "If Batman had to fight each of the original 6 Avengers with no prep time and meets them on the spot, when would he lose?" Then you'll not be short of answers (and opinions). Equally, you'll find lots of answers for "What's the best car insurance?"

You can answer whether to commit to becoming active in the Quora community with three simple questions:

1. Is there already content that is relevant to my audience?
2. Will my core audience/s use the platform?
3. Can I add value by adding/answering questions?

If the answer is yes to the three questions, then Quora could be a channel you can use to drive awareness and traffic to your content.

Since its inception, Quora has looked to establish itself as a premier Q&A platform. As with any social platform, it has its detractors, but should that prevent an organisation from utilising it to engage with a strong community, be helpful and build awareness?

Provided people still have questions; there will continue to be room for Quora and, more importantly, a potential platform for marketers to utilise to engage with potential audiences.

Image sources: Quora