Quora for Business: Establishing Thought Leadership Through Q&A

As a question-and-answer site that allows the most relevant answers to be voted up and promoted by the community, Quora is a social platform that allows businesses to demonstrate their expertise and establish themselves as thought leaders in their respective industries. 

Unlike other Q&A sites, Quora harnesses the power of the community to effectively crowd-source answers to specific problems while also providing a unique platform to add depth and personality to brands, further reinforcing their value proposition among key audiences. Possibilities for business leaders include facilitating professional connections and open-ended dialogue; this allows executives to gain unique insights into the problems or issues that their stakeholders are trying to solve while positioning themselves as experts on those issues.

Questions found on the site span every category imaginable, and the Quora community spans business leaders, politicians, actors, and journalists.

But it’s the community aspect of Quora that truly differentiates it from competitors like Answers.com or Yahoo Answers. The site’s users maintain the quality of the content posted by endorsing the best answers and censuring irrelevant or overly promotional responses. In order to maintain the site’s initial level of quality, Quora has appointed moderators and administrators to oversee conversations on topics. The platform has attracted many experts in numerous fields, who have also been recruited to supervise the content posted on topics within their given areas of expertise. 

Additionally, because Quora users are able to link questions and answers to their Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts, content posted to the site can be leveraged across all of a company’s social media channels. Therefore, even if a company’s Twitter followers aren’t on Quora specifically, they can still see the answers promoted, allowing a business to create content that goes beyond the 140-character limitations of answering a question with a Tweet.

Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia,  is an active member on the platform, answering questions about everything from his net worth and his stance on “hacktivisim” to how his company navigates the difference between censorship and editorial judgment. Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan took to Quora in 2012 to launch a passionate critique of Obama’s policy decisions and leadership. He then used the platform to interact with supporters, encouraging them to assist the campaign in any way they could.

Tristan Walker, Entrepreneur In Residence at Andreessen Horowitz, and formerly Director of Business at Foursquare, not only answers questions about all aspects of his business, but also divulges some of the details of his personal life. His contribution to the question “What are the most interesting incidents involving a ‘poke’ on Facebook?” told the story of how he met his wife. In response to “Which people in tech in San Francisco are interested in street photography?”, he expressed his interest in the art form, even including the link to his personal blog. This perfectly exemplifies what makes Quora a unique platform: it blends the nuances of thought leaders’ interests with their professional expertise, allowing users to both follow the topics and the people that bring the most value to their conversations.

With a user base of nearly 550,000 as of 2011, Quora’s value as a platform for thought leadership has been validated with an increasing number of threads from the site ranking within the top searches on Google.  

The wealth of information on Quora allows companies of all sizes and industries to gain unique insights into the needs of their stakeholders and effectively tailor their media strategies and messages to proactively address their needs. While answering questions from strangers on the Internet may seem strange at first, Quora provides a worthwhile platform for engagement, proactive communications, and community building that businesses should not be quick to discount.