6 fantastic ways to generate brand mileage from Quora

With user base close to 200 million out of which 40 million are based in USA and 15 million in India, Quora has serious potential for businesses and marketers. While above were the numbers, plain logic is also in favour of the most popular question answer website, which says:

“People go to Quora for answers to specific questions”

Of course Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have bigger user base but people don’t go on them to ask business and brand specific questions. This thought motivated me to come up with practical tips and ideas to generate brand mileage from Quora.

So, let’s get right to the point!

Write better answers

You came across a question from which you can generate business torque and you cannot wait to answer. The only problem is that you are not the only business for which it is relevant. So, here are some tips to make your answer climb to the top and stay there:

• Write a detailed answer. 6 lines would fall weak in front of an blog sized answer.

• Add media (images and videos) to your answer and add to its authority

• Add links of authority sites to further enhance the answer value.

Writing with above points in mind will make your answer one of the top ones. I guarantee.

Check marketing pitch

In the good words of Tom Fishburne, the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. Because nobody likes a marketing pitch, you have to craft your answer in a way that it doesn’t look like one. Here are some ideas to do it:

• Approach answers from a non-marketing angle.

• Be very conversational and casual

• Don’t call yourself the best. Prove it in a fun way.

Remember, people don’t come to Quora to meet sales people. They come to Quora to get answers from industry experts.

Keep looking

Don’t depend on Quora notifications to come across questions that are relevant to you. Use the Search field and ‘similar questions’ recommendations to find queries that you ought to answer. The best thing would be to create a Google Doc of all the questions that you find and share it with your team.

Slowly, you can go through all the business queries and also add new ones to the Sheet overtime. This is the long game approach you got to follow to dominate Quora.

Keep an eye on Quora

This is often recommended for Google but Quora, with its growing user base, is equally important. People go on the QA platform and ask brand specific questions. Whenever that happens, you got to be there and speak for your business.

Tools like Google Alerts don’t work for Quora. So, you have to make it a practice to check the platform twice a week for the opportunities. Just like Google, the platform is also crucial from reputation management point of view. So, that’s another reason to keep an eye on Quora.

Answer yourself

Quora community greatly appreciates when people at prominent places in an organization come forward to answer questions. This establishes brand trust and also conveys that you are an approachable bunch of people. I have seen CEOs of billion dollar companies answer brand related questions on the popular QA site.

Of course it’s possible that the ‘PR team’ takes care of it but the point to take home is that Quora matters and you go to be there. So, find few minutes every week to engage with the community on behalf of your business.

Plan questions

There is fair chance that questions that you think are crucial for your business are not currently on Quora. It is also possible that they might emerge later and you won’t know until it has 27 answers. So, the smart thing to do is put the question out there and answer it as well.

I know asking a question and then answering it on your own sounds like a cheap move but its way more than that. It’s being proactive and meeting a future demand.

End note

Quora is not a tricky channel but it does ask for commitment. There will be hundreds of questions out there related to your business and the number will keep growing. So, if you really want to make an impact, you got to be consistent.

Of course there are many other ways of using Quora for business and brand mileage. Blog and paid ads are few of them but I limited my post to Quora’s core.

Are you currently generating business torque from world’s most popular QA platform? Share your stories in the comments section and let’s start a discussion!