For a couple of years now, the topic of personal brand has been actively discussed in social networks. There are many personal branding guides online, which tell you how to build your personal brand. You can use social media like LinkedIn or blogging platforms like Medium to build your personal brand, but in this article, I want to talk about how you can use Quora.
What is a personal brand?
If we turn to history, the concept of brand originated in marketing, when companies were competing in the marketplace for consumers. At that time, brand was defined as a set of functional, emotional and psychological promises to the target consumer. That is, these are certain associations that arise in the consumer when he hears the name of the brand.
Now professionals, in order to be visible in the labor market and in their field, are turning to building a personal brand. For them, a personal brand is not the number of subscribers in social networks and not only a well-known name, but the associations and feelings that people have when they mention them. For example, you might hear Philip Kotler and think, “The Father of Modern Marketing.”
The 3 components of a personal brand
The three main components of a personal brand are:
- Your experience and professionalism. You must actively share your knowledge and ideas, express your point of view, speak at events, and be willing to be public. Focus on one topic in which you will be more knowledgeable than others.
- Reputation. When you publish or comment on something, think about how it will reflect on your reputation. It’s very hard to win and build, but easy to destroy with one wrong statement.
- Popularity. This component is achieved when you are already firmly established in one area and people are willing to recommend you to their friends and acquaintances.
How to use Quora to build your personal brand
So, how do you use Quora to build a personal brand? There are two ways to do this:
- Answer questions in your personal account
- Create a Space on Quora, develop it, and publish themed content there.
I’ll talk more about this below.
Opportunity №1: Your personal account
Register and set up your personal account. Quora will prompt you to select topics that interest you. Choose what you want to talk about: it could be technology, or it could be marketing or copywriting. Try to select topics that are relevant to your professional life. That way, your audience will associate you with those very topics.
Fill in information about yourself: curriculum vitae, education, your occupation, languages spoken, country of residence, and upload a high quality photo. The more complete your profile, the better. It gives more credibility to the audience.
When you’ve filled out your profile, start searching for questions about your topic and writing answers. Try to give a complete and well-structured answer: form headings and subheadings, use bold or italics, add images or infographics. First, this will raise your answer up the list among others, and second, structured answers rank well on Quora.
If your answer is complete and structured, answers the question, and demonstrates your expertise, then other users can vote for it (by clicking Upvote). Answers with more votes are considered great by Quora’s algorithms and are promoted. What’s more, your answer can get into the mailing list of all users. Then you’re guaranteed to get more views on your responses and profile.
Another great feature of Quora is that people can send requests for you to answer their questions (Answer Requests). This can also help you improve your expertise.
Remember, your answer will always be relevant, and over time its views and coverage will only increase because Quora ranks well with search engines.
Opportunity №2: Quora Spaces
Quora Spaces are a great way to build a community of like-minded people around you and your professional field.
Spaces gives you the ability to subscribe to communities and discussions that interest you or create your own. By joining certain communities or topics, you’ll see their content in your news feed.
In a community you can take on several roles:
- follower — you follow community updates
- contributor — who provides content,
- moderator — who accepts or rejects content
- admin — if you created the community
How do you grow your community? I have some tips for that:
1. Create a unique community and publish original content
For example, you can create a space for your brand and publish content on its behalf: share advice kits, expert comments, and more. Just don’t get carried away with excessive advertising in the community: Quora’s moderation system is unlikely to approve this, and the mission of the space is to provide useful content to your audience. Try to keep the ratio 95 to 5: 95% useful content and 5% marketing content.
The space is an opportunity to position you or your brand as an expert in your field, so think through your content plan and strategy.
2. Interact with other communities and your community
There are probably communities on Quora with similar themes. Talk to its creators, think about the idea of cooperation, conduct joint research, share each other’s notes. It’s another step toward building relationships and your personal brand.
Connect with your community. Show that there is a living person behind the community, that this community is you. Then you will be associated with that community, and your expertise and personal brand will grow.
Support your community: share a link to it on your social networks, and in your bio indicate that you are the creator of the community under that name.
To summarize
Treat the development of your personal brand as additional professional development. You can draw an analogy with studying and getting a diploma at the end: you do some tasks, practice, and at the end you get a position as an expert in one of the fields and recognition by the community. Be daring, experiment, and you are sure to succeed!
