Should Quora be a Part of Your Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Welcome to The Social Lab! This blog will not only help you navigate your personal social media, but also investigate marketing trends and examples of great social media work. Do you have something we should talk about? Make sure to send us an email or contact us on social media.

Have you heard of Quora yet? This question-and-answer site can provide solutions for an insane amount of problems, but marketers are just now beginning to realize it's potential when it comes to generating traffic and thought-leadership. Similar to Reddit, but more streamlined, Quora allows you to input your particular interests, and they will give you questions to answer for other people. While great in theory, this platform wouldn't be helpful at all if there wasn't an active community. Luckily, when you answer a question, you can easily get over 1000 views, in fact, we have gotten over 5,000 views multiple times.

When looking at our all-time views (1 year), we have received close to 50k views on our answers, while only answering a total of 75 questions. We are averaging over 666 views per answer, without even putting in a ton of effort (1 answer every 5 days). So how can this all benefit your marketing strategy? While it may not seem like a lot, we have generated over 60 website visits just from using Quora. These 60 individuals are people we already know are interested in social media and marketing since they were looking for an answer related to those topics. So let's say you answered 1 question every day, which would mean that you would have roughly 243,000 views on Quora. That would mean that you would garner roughly 292 visitors, and frankly, all you need is for one of them to be a legitimate lead in order to justify your work.

Another perk to Quora is that it can help improve SEO. Let's say you want to answer a question about how to gain more Instagram followers. Since we already created a blog post about that, we inputted a snippet of the blog into the answer for Quora, then directed viewers to head to our site to read more about the topic. This is a great way to get your links (backlinks) on other sites in a responsible manner. One disclaimer is to be careful with this power though. If you put your link everywhere in the post, or even in the signature over and over, you can get locked out. One positive is that Quora will not completely shadowban you, which is something that Reddit will do. If you make a mistake and add an unnecessary link to your post, then Quora will let you know that the post was removed, rather than your whole account. Don't let this fool you into thinking you can just keep making "mistakes" though. Quora is not the kind of place for growth hacks, it is the place for meaningful conversation where you are actually helping someone else solve a problem.

So how else can Quora help your marketing strategy? The platform really helps to develop thought-leadership on a personal scale. Many companies have a CEO or Founder that is the captain of the team. We have had many clients where we passed them Quora questions so the leader of the company could answer the questions and help establish more thought-leadership. Without a doubt, potential leads will find interest in a CEO that takes the time to answer questions from random people on the internet. Not to mention that social media is one part of a funnel that is really about developing trust with a potential lead. A person that just needs a little extra push to become a legitimate warm traffic lead will be especially convinced when they see that the CEO of a company is taking time out of her schedule to answer questions.

Is Quora the be all end all of your marketing strategy? No, but it is a great way to generate some personal buzz, while also attracting your target audience to head over to your site. Furthermore, there is also an "upvote" option that allows viewers to like a post that they think really answers the question well. The more high-quality answers you make, the more likely your post will be viewed by more people. This allows for a touch of virality within Quora, which means that your answer could begin to "trend", which bodes well for even more views and website clicks. Quora may not seem like much yet, but we really believe that it could be taking over LinkedIn very soon when it comes to social media performance.

What do you think? Have you used Quora before? let us know if it helped your marketing strategy by emailing us or commenting below.