Quora

Marketing
Guide
David Reilly

In partnership with
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Contents
What is Quora? 3

Unique features 4

How can Quora help your 5

marketing and thought leadership?

How to use it 6
About The Author
David Reilly - Digital Consultant

David Reilly is Digital Share your Quora expertise 11

on other social media networks
Consultant and trainer
and writes about
what it means to thrive
in the digital world

David@letslearndigital.com

Tracking content performance 12

020 8299 0557
@DavidLGReilly

About Digital Doughnut

Summary 13
Digital Doughnut connects the global marketing
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Doughnut both leverages and provides value The content of this report is the copyright of Lets Learn Digital and is reproduced
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and informed by practitioners experience. Derivatives 4.0 International license.

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What is Quora?
Quora is a growing user generated Question and
Answer community community co-founded by two
former Facebook employees, Adam D’Angelo and
Charlie Cheever, and launched in US in June 2009.
Quora works by members asking questions and Quora
delivering you answers and content from people on the
community who already know the answer.

Mission Statement

Quora’s mission is “to share and grow the world’s

knowledge” by connecting people with the know-
how to the people seeking it. Simple. It is designed
around the premise that a vast amount of often
specialist knowledge is hugely valuable to a wide
range of people, but is often only available to a
select few -either because it’s locked in people’s
heads, or because those with the knowledge
simply don’t have an incentive to share it. The
wide range of different perspectives available to
the users enables them to learn subjects in greater
depth. Quora helps them better understand each
other, and in turn empowers a perpetual wheel
of sharing for the benefit of the community
members across the globe.

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Unique features
While there are already a number of well established
‘Question and Answer’ sites, such as Yahoo! Answers
and answers.com, Quora can be distinguished from the
others in a number of fundamental ways:

It is designed to encourage and recognise the It allows users to follow topics and subjects
quality of questions and answers. Top writers that interest them and gives users full control
are recognized by the ability of the community
of readers to ‘upvote’ (similar to a Facebook
like) the answer. Contributors who consistently The design and user experience is simple,
provide valuable responses to users questions intuitive with a clear logical navigation and
are rewarded with a Top Writers status, which hierarchy
recognizes the importance of the writer’s
quality, expertise, knowledge, authenticity, Quora has inbuilt networking by default. Sign in
and empathy. Some people in the Top Writers via Twitter or Facebook automatically connects
group are experts in specific fields, while you with these other networks
others are simply great writers with a talent
for describing the human condition and the
world around us. Ever year Quora announces
the winners of the ‘Top Writer awards’ with
the ‘Top Writer’ badge added to the winners
profiles.

It allows users to vote on answers and

encourages accountability and reputation
amongst its community of users. For example,
check out this excellent answer on why book
retailer Borders failed, which was upvoted by
the community

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How can Quora help
your marketing and
thought leadership?
Quora is excellent for promoting your
business for these reasons

For research purposes. Inspiration for headlines for your topics of

It’s a fantastic research tool enabling users
from across the world to not only gain access
to expert answers, but more importantly as
marketers it allows us to really understand the
key questions being asked around a specific
topic of interest.
It enables you to build real subject authority.
Quora is about being authoritative on a
subject, and building relationships based on
your competency over the course of multiple
questions with the people who share similar
interests. The extremely tight subject matter
focus and smaller scope allows for greater
intimacy, and lowers the barriers to being a
consistent and useful contributor over the
long term.
choice.
Quora search can be filtered to only display
the questions that are being asked around
a specific topic, which is a great way to get
inspiration for article headlines, for example.
Access to a growing and engaged audience.
Quora has approximately 80 million monthly
unique users, 42% from the US, 20% from India
and just under 3% coming from the UK. This
equates to just over 2million active users in the
UK, a small number compared to Facebook
and Twitter, but consistently growing.

Improve your writing skills.

Using Quora will improve your written
communication skill sets. It enabled you
to write concise, clear responses to
questions instead of waffling. This is
invaluable.

Encouraging quality questions

that engage your audience.
To get significant value from Quora you need
to ask interesting and intriguing questions to
get feedback. Ask the right question and the
answers will arrive.

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How to use it
Build your profile
Your profile biography is an excellent means of
branding, and should be both professional and catchy. It
should also be short, since Quora will show only the first
50 characters of your whole tagline (your name and bio)
above the answer you post. Mention your brand name
as close to the beginning as you can, and make the most
of your 50 characters.
Complete your Quora account by adding a well written
detailed profile. The ‘About Me’ section should include
your areas of expertise, interests, education, as well as
your previous employment. Leonid S. Knyshov, CEO of
Sendlinks, offers these valuable tips for creating your
own profile:
l Set your topic-specific bio to convey your authority
and verify that Quora shows the correct short bio on
your answers
l Don’t mention your business directly in your answers.
Feel free to mention it in your Quora profile and in
your topic bio
l Comply with Quora’s “Be Nice, Be Respectful” policy
on disclosing affiliations in your answers
l Refrain from adding a “signature” at the end of your
posts. They look tacky, will get you noticed in a
negative way, and are redundant when you use the
topic-specific short bio correctly

Note: Think carefully about your tag line. Quora will

show only the first 50 characters of your whole tagline
(your name and bio) above the answer you post.

The author’s Quora profile

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7 How to use it

Think carefully about your tag line. Remember that

Quora will only show the first 50 characters of your
whole tagline (your name and bio) above any answers
you post.

The author’s profile heading

Use the Employment section to add your company

details and logo’s as shown in the example below:

Add your employment history to your profile

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Display your areas of expertise

Once you have completed your Bio the next step is
to populate the ‘knows about’ section. Think carefully
about these subjects, they should reflect your mission,
areas of expertise and your company proposition.

Populate the ‘knows about’ section

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9 How to use it

Once you’ve completed your subject choices in

‘feeds’, Quora will personalise your news feed with a
combination of recent questions and popular answers
from the topics you’ve chosen to follow.

Your content feeds in the left navigation

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Getting active:
Submitting Questions & Answers

Once you set up your account, go on to Quora and start
examining the content and your areas of interest. Read
through various questions and answers, follow people
who participate in discussions, upvote their updates on
answers you like and start getting involved.
Your upvotes appear on your public Quora profile,
making this a great way to show there’s some relevant
activity going on, even if your account is relatively new.
You can start submitting questions at the top of the
navigation bar here

Note: Quora offers an excellent drop down menu of

similar questions already asked and answered

Your content feeds in the left navigation

Quora also offers this great

feature where you ask
a question to a specific
subject matter expert to
get their opinion on the
question being asked, by
clicking on the Ask button.
The recipients will then
receive the question in their
newsfeed as defined by
Ask specific experts their own areas of expertise
in their personal bio.

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Share your Quora expertise

on other social media networks
Quora allows you to auto-share your answers on Twitter,
Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr and WordPress.com. To do
this go to your Quora account and use Settings.

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Tracking content
performance
Quora’s free basic analytics, accessible through the stats The analytics page shows you most clicked, shared and
tab, allows you to analyze your content performance on upvoted content within different periods of time: the last
the platform. 7 days, last 30 days, last 3 months and all-time.

This feature will help you to find your most popular

content in terms of clicks and see what works best with
the Quora community.

The authors stats page

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Summary
Quora is a brilliant source of ideas and inspiration
and offers lot potential for marketers who are
serious about building thought leadership and
connections within specific markets.

It is simple to get started. Once your profile is

completed, the secret to building your reputation
is to answer questions in which you have a deep
level of knowledge. Your own company is
obviously a thing in which you have expertise and
that’s where you can start. You should then look at
areas that your company focuses on, and provide
answers to questions related to those topics.
Finally, understand and appreciate that Quora is a
good place to connect with interesting people.

Good luck, and we’d love to hear from you if

you have any other great tips or examples to
support this guide. Please post your responses
at www.digitaldoughnut.com

If you think you’d like to contribute your expertise,

knowledge and experience around a specific
topic to a future How To Guide please email
contribute@digitaldoughnut.com

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