9 Interesting Tips on How To Use Quora for Business

Quora has come a long way since its inception back in 2009 and currently has a growing user base of more than 195 million active monthly users.

Today Quora is an amazingly huge question and answer website that has been amassing a lot of attention over the last couple of years. If you’ve ever tried Yahoo answers, you can say that Quora is a much more refined version of the latter.

Why is Quora so popular today? It is partly because Quora has managed to attract thought leaders or industry experts who answer questions pertaining to their niche. Also, Quora has never been the same since celebrities and world leaders began declaring their presence.

A lot of businesses have been organically engaged on Quora answering questions related to their products and services. When correctly utilized, Quora has the potential to generate a ton of traffic to your website and garner a loyal following that you crave for.

Here is a list of 9 important strategies you can use to build your business using Quora;

1. Let Your Profile Speak for Itself

Completing your profile is important to increase the visibility of your business and is the first step towards announcing your presence on Quora. Answering questions in the best way possible will not do much good for your business if people don’t recognize who you are and what you are about.

Quora displays your bio above the answers you post and gives a you chance to show people what you are about, in one glance. Therefore, make sure you have your brand name, logo and a brief power packed bio in place. It’s important to keep the bio short and catchy and have your brand name close to the beginning of the sentence. It has a character limit of 80 and its upto you to make the most of it.

Your bio can be edited to suit the answers you post. For example, a bio well suited for an answer on “Content Creation” might not be suited for an answer on “Paid advertising”. You have the flexibility to change the bio and allow the audience to better perceive your credibility in the answered field.

Also complete other sections of your profile which include a neatly crafted ‘About me’ section, your profile credentials, topics that you know about (especially your area of expertise) and other relevant sections.

2. Dig the Gold Mine of Content

Running out of content ideas for your blog? Don’t worry as Quora is a superpower for bloggers when it comes to churning out content ideas. By typing your keyword in Quora search, you can use the auto-suggested questions and topics to get an idea of what people are searching for. If you go ahead and select a question, you will see a tab of related topics and questions that quora suggests based on its perfectly designed algorithm.

To get the most out of Quora, the best practice is to follow juicy questions/ threads. By juicy questions, I mean questions that have  a good number of followers, answers, and a topic that is still trending. There is no point in selecting a topic that has gone dry and out of trend.

For example, if your business is about beauty products, type your keyword in the search box, select a topic and quora will give you a list of the most trending questions related to your keyword.  

If you have a faint idea of what you want to write about but are not sure how to derive an entire blog post out of it, there is one way. Ask a question about your topic on Quora and seek answers from experts. All the answers you get for the question will serve as ideas and content for your blog post.

3. Build a Quora Page for Your Brand

When we talk about a business page, the first thing that comes to our mind is a Facebook page. However, with Quora, we are not exactly creating a page. Rather, we are creating a topic regarding our business or brand.

Why should we create a topic around our business? The intention is to invite people to review your topic so that it acts as social proof. If people are talking positively about your company on your profile, then it will create a good impression on people who visit your profile.

Creating a topic is simple. Enter your business name in the search bar. Then, head over to the ‘topics’ section on the left sidebar and click on the ‘create topic’ tab. Once you have created the topic, customize it by adding a well suited description and your brand logo. You can then request people to review your topic by using the ‘Request for Reviews’ tab.

You also have an option of creating your own blog on Quora. Since you are looking for ways to promote your business, it is likely that you already have a blog outside of Quora. If you still want to go ahead and create a Quora blog for your business, it can serve as a good platform to repurpose your blog posts and further solidify your expertise in the eyes of your audience.

4. Make Influential Friends

A part of building a brand on quora is having a successful circle of influence. Quora is an excellent portal for finding experts and thought leaders in your niche, follow them, and connect with them.

Quora has done a good job with its Ask to Answer feature. When you ask a question, quora gives you a list of people who can best answer your question. The list usually consists of authoritative people in your selected niche. These are the people who have established credibility over a period of time with their expert opinions.

Once you get to know the top people, you need a way to connect with them. You can do this by giving honest comments on their answers to various posts. You can also choose to directly reach out to them and share your views.

Remember, the goal is to build a connection first before you ask them for help. The best suited method to build connection is to first establish some credibility for yourself. When you do this people will be more receptive to you. You can do this by following the topics followed by the top influencers in your field and answer the related questions to the best of your ability. Focus on helping people with your valuable advice. Eventually your answers will be noted and liked by the experts.That will be an ice breaker for you to directly approach them with your plans.  

5. Share Knowledge and Build Credibility

Success with Quora is directly related to the level of credibility you build in your niche. This is achieved by answering questions in a clear and concise manner that address the pressing questions of your audience. Eventually, people will see you as a person who adds value and look up to you as an expert in the niche. They will want to learn more about you and also look into the products that you are offering.

To see success with Quora, its important that you hammer this fact in your head- “Share Knowledge. Avoid over-promotion”. Don’t be the guy who is always promoting himself. Be the guy who delivers immense value and people will be attracted to you. Patience and consistency are of the essence here.

Also, being the face of your business or brand will help people to be more receptive and open with you. Always remember that people want to interact with a real person and not with a company or brand.

6. Ask Good Questions

Quora is not a portal that can be solely used for marketing. It can be used to get solutions to your own questions regarding your business and seek expert advice. (This is one more way to connect with experts).

Questions can also be used to engage people in your niche and build a following. This gives you a measure of people who are actively engaging in the topic and is an opportunity to target them. Searching and following the topics relevant to your business helps you to handpick important questions and follow them.

If you’ve followed our post on using Facebook groups for business, you will have a good idea about the things that you can do to build an active and engaging community. Consider Quora as a much larger community with tremendous potential, the power of which can be harnessed by regularly asking and answering questions and thus, engaging your audience.

Another option is to post questions that create awareness about your business among people. This is the most natural form of marketing you can use. Questions direct people’s attention on a particular subject and spark involvement and understanding.

For example, consider that you have a company named ‘X’. You can post a question on Quora asking “What is company ‘X’ all about?”, “Why is company ‘X’ successful?”. Such questions are directed towards educating people about your business and also get to know their opinion about your brand.

When you post questions related to your brand, don’t forget to tag the industry experts!

7. Use Quora Ads to Your Advantage

Last year, this popular question and answer exchange forum had launched the self -service ads platform, which was a huge bonus. It provided users with basic targeting options like topic targeting and also location and platform based targeting (web or mobile).

Recently, Quora has taken ads targeting a step further with a suite of new features. The targeting is more refined with the introduction of contextual targeting (targeting specific content) and people-based targeting (targeting specific users based on their behaviour).

The new targeting features include;
Contextual Targeting:

1. Question targeting– Target your ads to show up on specific questions.
2. Topic targeting– You can also choose to target the topics related to the selected question
3. Multiple topic targeting– by giving a quora search for your keyword, you’ll find multiple topics matching your keyword and you can target all of them.

People -based targeting:

1. Website retargeting– you can target people who have already visited your website and taken some kind of action with the help of quora’s javascript pixel.
2. Lookalike targeting– when you target specific people, target their friends too. The essence of lookalike targeting is to target people with similar interests.
3. Interest targeting– Targets the audience who have recently engaged with certain topics.

The location and platform targeting options are available for all the features discussed above. You can learn more about advertising on Quora by visiting their business page.  

Before deciding to target ads, it’s important that you understand that people are coming to this portal basically to seek answers to their queries or to make buying decisions. It helps immensely to mainly focus on sharing knowledge and establishing authority than solely relying on ads to grow your business.

8. Track Your Competition

Quora is an excellent market research tool that can give on the ground feedback about your competitors and their products. By entering your competitors’ names in the search bar, Quora will return a list of questions that are being asked by people regarding the subject.

Take some time to carefully go through the list and understand the gaps that your business can fill in. You can also follow certain threads so that you get notifications related to them on your feed and thus, always keep track of them.

As a word of caution, be careful not to indulge in downsizing your competition or writing something against them. Use the platform to educate people on everything that you can offer and avoid comparison with other brands or people.

9. Analyze Your Quora Stats

Quora displays free stats for all its users with which you can track essential parameters like upvotes, views and shares for all your content on Quora. These metrics will help you measure how your content has been performing and the steps you can take to improve the results.

The best part here is that you can track how your audience has been guided to your answers or content. You can see if they stumbled upon your answer on their feed, by checking your profile or by any other means. This helps to influence people better and focus more on the techniques that are working well.

Also, if you notice that certain type of answers are gaining a lot of attention, it makes sense to indulge more in such topics.

In Conclusion

Though Quora is not as big as other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest etc, it is quietly cruising along its way to stardom. More and more brands are beginning to realize its potential and are incorporating Quora as an integral part of their marketing strategy.

As the famous saying goes, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 yrs ago. The second best time is now.” Begin utilizing this platform now so that you can reap the rewards, far greater than your efforts, in the coming years.

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