Quora is an information service that works on the principle of question and answer. A user asks a question and an expert answers it. The website offers questioners a forum by building up a pool of experts who can provide professional answers to users’ questions in various areas.
General information
Quora was founded by Charlie Cheever and Adam D’Angelo in June 2009 in Mountain View. D’Angelo and Cheever were employees of the social network Facebook, D’Angelo the function of the CTO (Chief Technical Officer) and Cheever as a manager. After a six-month beta phase, in which the project was only accessible to a certain group of people, Quora was also launched for the general public in July 2011. Currently, questioners can log in via Facebook, Google Plus or Twitter. Quora relied on expertise right from the start: well-known personalities from various industries were recruited as answerers in order to competently answer the sometimes specific questions of the users.
The information service is not an encyclopedia of knowledge, but rather a pool of experts and questioners trying to find the best answer to a specific question. Participants include Google product manager Nate Smith, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and, more recently, even US President Barack Obama, who answers questions about his health program. Due to the high quality of the answers, Quora is considered an expert platform and a relatively elite collection of knowledge, and at the same time a crowd-sourcing project due to the participation of many users.
functions
With Quora, questions from users can be tracked in a targeted manner. Via a feed, users can subscribe to certain information and discussions and thus stay up to date in a limited subject area.
Quora states that there are over 400,000 different topics to subscribe to. Anyone who has set up a profile on Quora can follow socially relevant discussions but also ask their own questions to which they cannot find answers on other platforms such as Wikipedia.
If a question is asked, it can in principle be answered by any Quora member. With any luck, the answer will come from an expert who has direct experience in his or her subject area. In addition, within the network, it is possible to subscribe to blogs and create blogs yourself to expand and share your knowledge. A special feature of Quora is the integration of social functions that round off the knowledge service. In addition to subscribing to feeds, users can follow each other to network together.
practical relevance
However, certain rules and restrictions apply to creating questions on Quora. Every questioner must first read a tutorial before asking a question. There it is explained how he technically asks a question and what conditions are attached to it. For example, a question must be a complete, correct sentence that is simple and easy to understand for other users and potential answerers. As a rule, the questions are asked in English, German is possible, but due to a small German user group, answers may take some time.
Importance of online marketing
Quora is one of the fastest-growing websites in the world. The two founders, former Facebook employees, will certainly benefit from their ex-employer here. However, the quality of the answers and last but not least the technical accessibility of the website suffers from the increasing traffic.
Experts suspect that the number of high-quality answers to questions will decrease as the number of users increases. Ultimately, it is also unclear how such a popular website with a high level of traffic pays off – i.e. converts the high number of users into sales. Because Quora is considered tidy and minimalist in terms of design. The users like that, but advertising cannot be placed here. For influencers (people with great influence), however, Quora is a platform that can serve different purposes. It can bring a topic to the fore, increase the reputation of a website or be used to improve the image.
A user who is active on Quora and competently answers questions can certainly be considered an expert in their field. This should have a positive effect on online marketing and, under certain circumstances, KPIs and/or branding effects can be increased in this way – provided the answers are of high quality.