Quora Strategy for Marketers and PR Pros

By Jessica Donlon | Posted July 6, 2011 | 0 Comment(s) | Filed in: Social Media

Question Mark In February, we published the blog post, Quora Strategy: The Incomplete Guide for Beginners. The post offered a basic plan for monitoring, responding and raising your profile among Quora’s ever-growing pool of questions and answers.

Recently at TechCrunch Disrupt, Quora’s founder, Charlie Cheever (@ccheever), gave insight into the company’s business strategy—including how it has worked to attract quality content, how it measures success, and its business plan.

“One of the goals we have for Quora is to have all types of people sharing all types of knowledge. I would imagine a world where I where I could come up with all the things I want to know and find them on Quora.” — Charlie Cheever, Quora

Quora’s Population

Michael Sebastian (@msebastian) of Ragan’s PR Daily shared KISSmetrics’ infographics about Quora’s growth and processes, estimating that between January 2010 and January 2011, Quora’s growth was up 37,000 percent. It’s not surprising that many of the leading answers on Quora come from its early adopters and most active users—many of whom are tech-savvy business influencers.

Bob Brown’s (@alphadoggs) Network World article examines whether Quora is the next social network that IT professionals in particular need to know. The topic of “technology,” for example, has more than 50,000 followers on the network and hundreds of questions.

Quora for Your Clients

Technology is just one example. Search Quora for yours or your client's industry to find relevant topics, follow tags and identify influencers. Unlike many other social networks, Mario Sundar (@mariosundar) argues that Quora isn’t about who you know, but what you know—putting a face on businesses and making Quora a vehicle to share inside knowledge from corporate leadership.

How can we, as marketers and PR professionals, get the most out of Quora for our clients (and ourselves)? Following are a few suggestions:

Connect with industry bloggers and media. Follow similar topics, their questions and answers, and vote or participate when you can to get on their radars.
Follow popular topics among your buyer personas, continually tracking their interests so you can adjust your blog’s editorial calendar based on their interests. With the ability to share and post answers to your blog, use Quora to kill two birds with one stone.
Position company leaders as the experts they are. Encourage them to create profiles, and send relevant questions their way to facilitate participation. Though Quora’s population may not be that of the “big three” social networks, its SEO is strong, which can help get answers in front of those seeking expertise.
Pre-screen survey questions with Quora, to make adjustments and refine before taking them to the market.
Gain insight from passionate potential buyers to adjust your messaging, content and sales to their needs.
Find out directly from media contacts how they want to be pitched. (Like Mashable, for example.)

Just for Fun: Some of Quora’s Best Questions

At TechCrunch Dispurt, Cheever noted some of the most visited questions on Quora, and I’ve compiled a few additional interesting questions below. Like other social networks, Quora grabs a pulse on a variety of topics that people care most about—including business, current events, pop culture and more — such as:

From Cheever:

A few more:

Are you active on Quora? What results have you seen from the platform?

Jessica Donlon is a consultant at PR 20/20, a Cleveland-based inbound marketing agency and PR firm. Connect with Jessica on Twitter @JessicaDonlon or Quora.

Stay updated: Subscribe to the PR 20/20 blog, check us out on Facebook or follow the team on Twitter.

Image Source: WingedWolf