Quora Case Study – The Wonderful World of Quora

About Quora

Quora is the place where questions get answers. This website helps online users raise queries for knowing the unknown and reply to ones they are good at answering. Founded in 2009, this community based platform has 500,000+ registered users and serves to global need of knowledge.

FACTS to learn about Quora

• Ranks 407th among most heavily-trafficked sites of the US
• Ranks 436th among most popular site in the world

Quora has become a substantive resource for millions of entrepreneurs and one of the best sources for Business to Business market. Majorly used by writers, scholars, bloggers, investors, consultants, students this Q/A site has much to offer in terms of knowledge sharing, connection building and information gathering.

What to do on Quora

Along with question answering this Q/A platform can be used to:

• Read queries and answers of preferred area of interest.
• Vote up interesting answers.
• Send private messages to users who have similar interest.
• Add relevant topics to the questions asked.
• Invite friends and other Quora users to reply on a query.
• Check statistics for questions, posts and queries added.
• Answer open questions. (Open questions are the ones that go unanswered)

Quora Structure & Functionality

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Unique Features of Quora

1. Gamification Knot

This exclusive feature of Quora is meant to increase the measure of user engagement on website. With the use of game design elements, it suggests of making products & services appealing to target audience. Based on game thinking, Gamification aims at increasing ROIs by prompting use contribution.

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2. Using Gamification in Quora

• Start answering
• Earn Credits
• Promote helpful replies
• Share Replies on Social Media Networks

When you begin it gives you 500 credits initially to encourage you to actively participating in discussions. Here is all you must know about credits:-

• Earn credits by answering question/surveys or by having your answer voted up.

• Get 10 credits when someone follows your Question
• Promote your question by spending some credits. If you want to promote it to 100 people, you need to spend 500 credits. You can do the same for your answers also.
• Answering is free. Moreover, if your answers are getting upvoted by users and your Quora profile is having good authority then you can set option, “Ask to Answer”.Even if you don’t answer the question you can fetch some credits out of it. You can set your asking fee as follows:-

• Relevant answers get upvoted. Each vote-up adds 10 credits to your account.
• Answer voted up by the questioner also gets 50 credits.
• Ask friends for queries (in case one runs out of credits). Those who have 500+ credits can give it.
• Link Quora account to FB/Twitter to gain more credits.
• Using credits, promote your question/answer/blog.

• Use your credits to ask answer in Quora.

Quora Blogging

Besides,questions and answers, Quora allows you to create a blog too. Adding promotional content may not be a good idea as Quora focuses on information sharing and may ban the user.

How to start a blog on Quora?

• Give a name that can represent the blog.
• Add relevant URL address to the blog.
• Adding description to the blog is optional but it is recommended to add a description that defines the activity of blog.

Advantages of Quora Blogging

• Add relevant tags(of Quora’s 300,000 topics) to posts or entire blogs to reach more users.
• Integrate helpful answers to blog post.
• View your blog post viewers just below the post.
• Increase viewers list on Quora as well as other platforms linked to it by getting up votes from followers and other Quora users.
• Get real comments from the users who are actually interested in reading your content and find your products/services useful.

How to Choose Topic for Blog Post?

Explore topics and plan a simple yet unique content related to your area of specialization.

• Try to guide people instead of focusing on promotion.
• Be real with your audience. Users will surely appreciate it.
• Do not try to add multiple things in a single topic. It increases confusion in readers’ mind.
• Keep track of users’ interest.

Advantages of Quora

• Quora has zero tolerance for Spam.
• Quora allows Peer Networking. You can connect with industry experts to get recommendations, guest posts & referrals.
• Can be used for Name, Recognition and Links.
• Helps users find people from similar industry by asking questions
• Tells what others are saying about your business industry.
• Helps businesses improve customer satisfaction by tracking interests of converted as well as potential buyers.
• If you work in an industry that is spread across nations and continents, then Quora can function like a local business mixer.
• You can generate leads through Quora by making valuable contacts and finding potential clients.

What Quora users think about it?

Limitations of Quora

• It does not allow scheduled posts.
• If somebody is exploring Quora anonymously, it asks you to sign up first, which is quite frustrating for the user who is not interested in instant sign up.

• It offers a basic design for your profile as well as for blog posts. It does not allow that much help to make our blog post look visually stronger. It looks like as if we are looking at the piece of content provided by Quora, not by us.
• It does not directly allow users to subscribe for Quora content as wordpress does.
• Content once added to Quora will not remain yours. Quora will then be responsible for submitting, posting and displaying that content. See Quora terms of services.

Why Quora?

Quora is becoming one of the most trusted and reliable websites for brand marketing and traffic generation for online businesses. Here are few crucial reasons why one can use it for:-

• Get insights of your industry topics
• Find millions of users who are interested in knowing about your business.
• Share you expertise on every topic. It will definitely get appreciated.
• You will get to know more about business industry and handle it better. With active participation, one can learn something new every day.
• Quora represents a decent combination of Twitter, Facebook, commenting systems, Google buzz& forums, which makes it adequate & user friendly.
• You can send direct messages to the people who are interested in your services, products etc.
• Quora answers rank well in Google search results especially for Question-related queries.

Getting Started

Quora has an easy sign up process. You can create your Quora account either with Google, Facebook, Twitter or sign up using email.

After signing up, you have to fill details in your profile, which includes your name, biography, description, interests, people you follow etc. It is important to give maximum details to build profile authority, reputation and trust.

How to engage Users on Quora?

Whenever a user shares effective information that raises or satisfies curiosity, it successfully grabs instant attention on Quora. But to make the most of it, your profile should not miss any related information. Build a strong profile by adding proper name, biography, description and link to social media accounts.

• Follow topics of your industry. Become an active participant in those topics by adding good queries and adding informative and valuable answers. If you add detailed answer, then you can also add reference links to the external posts. Avoid doing spam.

• Do not hesitate from upvoting any valuable comment and query. This activity shows that you are appreciating other users’ content too.
• Keep adding answers to topics that are being followed by large number of users. It shows the popularity of query.
• Keep a check on topics that are getting noticed more. This will help you in planning your marketing strategy through Quora.

• You can set your biography according to the topics you choose for answering.

These are the things you need to take care of, in order to make a profile more authoritative and trustworthy.

Quora for Businesses

Quora helps businesses to build their presence and trust among customers. Here, you can follow people who are leaders in your industry. Quora provides you:-

• Communities
• Good Content
• Option to participate actively in communities
• Brand consistency- It comes from people that come back time &again.

If you find any good content, you can share the piece of that content with your followers and any other profiles that accept embedded links and quotes, like this:-

It will give you the embed code of that selected text, so that you can share it on other websites.

• Adding detailed and thoughtful answers to Quora is the best way to establish yourself as an expert and increase your credibility.
• Answering questions under topics that your business offers without promoting your business makes a good impact on conversions.
• There are people who may be looking for the services and products you offer. Try to spend some time once in a week finding those people and reply them.

Market your business on Quora and other social media sites.
Request social marketing plan

Evenbrite is the perfect example of business using Quora for lead generation & conversion. In an answer to, “what’s the best thing to do for New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles, CA?” TigheFlatley, the community manager has offered idea that looks more like a helpful suggestion than spam.

This is the actual instance of non spammy marketing. Here the answer suffices question’s goal by offering suitable solution and so its chances of traveling far on Quora are higher. Adding value to user engagement builds connections and that’s precisely how leads are generated on a Q/A site.

For Online Reputation Management

Online reputation is built on authority, the higher you gain it the brighter is your status. Making your brand prominent is the first step of ORM and Quora offers this opportunity by allowing users to flaunt their expertise. This platform is trusted by and large due to the genuine identities of experts. Sharing in-depth answers and participating in industry related topics can help you build a convincing Quora profile which in turn can rank well in search engine results page and stamp you as a specialist.

Discuss your online reputation case with ORM experts.
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What to avoid in Quora?

While using Quora, you need to take care of few things like violating terms and conditions.By continuing this, your account can be blocked and you may no longer be able to use it for lifetime. Here are the things that you should avoid while using Quora:

• If you are using Quora for your business, add your actual designation there. It is recommended to not add fake biography and designations to it.
• If you are not participating in discussions, you are at potential disadvantage.
• Do not think like marketer while using Quora.
• Stop trying to sell, and start focusing on leading, influencing, and connecting instead.
• Quora is flooded with the queries, which include people looking for any product and service. Most of the users’ replies have this in common, “Check out (my website)”. It’s a wrong approach. Using such phrases looks like self-promotion. If your answer is good enough then users will certainly recommend your products and services.

Conclusion

The purpose of this guide is to make people understand how Quora can be used effectively. The purpose of this case study is to channelize all the possible ways one can use for the betterment, be it for knowledge sharing or business networking. Making appropriate use of resources provided by Quora can greatly help businesses in lead generation and brand or individual identity building.