Writing on Quora as a business

Quora is a place to gain and share knowledge. It’s a platform to ask questions and connect with people who contribute unique insights and quality answers. This empowers people to learn from each other—including businesses—and to better understand the world.

Why write on Quora?

There are several reasons it makes sense for brands and businesses to have a presence on Quora.

Platform reach

With more than 300 million monthly visitors to the site, Quora is known as one of the highest quality user-generated content platforms. Quora is also available in 24 languages—further expanding the global reach of this platform. You don’t need a large personal following to get started; product features like the Quora Feed and the Quora Email Digest drive distribution of your content to interested audiences, resulting in thousands or even millions of views of your content. Most answers on Quora can also be repurposed on your own personal or business blogs, increasing the ROI on the time you spend writing them.

As Quora’s audience grows, we’re continuing to invest in building a world class ad platform and rolling out new ways for advertisers to reach their target customers. Our first advertisers used Topic Targeting to reach high-intent audiences on Quora. Today, we offer 10 different targeting options for our advertisers to mix and match the types that will achieve their unique campaign objectives.

SEO and evergreen content

Quora content is searchable through Google and usually ranks high on the search engine. Quora answers can reach millions of people who are searching for an answer to a particular question. And answers on Quora don’t disappear or lose momentum after a few minutes or days. They’re evergreen, continuing to garner views, upvotes, comments, and shares beyond the normal lifespan of a post on other platforms, and lasting years in the internet spotlight. When building a content strategy for your business or simply for yourself as a thought leader, Quora should be at the top of your list.

Thought leadership

There have been several high profile writers on the platform, including Justin Trudeau, Arianna Huffington, President Obama, Sheryl Sandberg, Hillary Clinton, and Noam Chomsky. Businesses such as IBM Security, Washington Post, The New York Times, and many others also use Quora to demonstrate thought leadership and engage their target audience. Readers on Quora and seekers who find the site through search come to know Quora as a source for high-quality questions and answers, much of it evergreen knowledge, written by credible authors. Quora is a platform where knowledge is in demand. Writing when you know you have an audience can be both more compelling and, pragmatically, a more clear return on the investment of your time.

Personalization and content distribution

For readers, we use signals from topics and people they follow, answers they interact with, and questions they search for to populate their Feed and Digest with interesting stories for them. As a writer, your answers get matched with relevant topics, which helps ensure that the right people see what you write: people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say. This makes every view and upvote that much more valuable. We also use these systems to specifically select questions for you. Questions act like writing prompts to help you find your next topic to write about.

Questions are organized by topics and there are a variety of topics on Quora. Given there are more than 300 million monthly visitors engaging with and writing a variety of content, your target audience is also likely on Quora.

For all of these reasons, Quora is a great place for businesses to share knowledge, build their brands, and connect with their target audiences. 

How to write on Quora as a business

Answer questions on topics you know about.

The best answers are trustworthy and credible, so answer questions where you are a subject expert. Start by looking for missing information in existing answers, and provide additional informational value. Ultimately, your answers should have value for the question-asker.

If you represent a brand, take an additional moment to determine whether your brand should answer the question, or you should.

Build your company and individual brand.

Businesses can choose to answer as a brand, or have an individual participate on Quora. There are benefits to both, and different questions may call for a different voice for your brand.

Individual Profiles

• Uses the pronoun “I”
• Focus on thought leadership
• Ideal for FAQs about personal experience, especially in your industry
• Best for sharing actionable items & advice

Best practices for writing on Quora as a business

1. Fill out your profile.

Your profile gives the Quora community explicit signals of your credibility. A good profile also helps people find you when they are looking for experts to answer their questions on Quora.

An ideal profile has the following:

• A high-quality profile photo or logo
• A short tagline explaining what you do
• A brief bio of what your business does and what you are offering

This is a great place to add links to your website and social platforms.

2. Format your answer.

Correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar make content on Quora better and easier to read.

Here are some recommended guidelines for formatting your answers:

• Use bolds, italics, underlines, quotes, photos, and videos thoughtfully

• Use paragraphs and subheadings to break up large blocks of text to improve readability

• Use the numbered and bullet point list functions for all itemized lists

• Use the block quote function to indent quotes
• Use numbers in square brackets (e.g., [1]) to denote footnotes

3. Quality over quantity.

Answer thoughtfully and keep the question-asker in mind. Demonstrate credibility by making factually correct statements, citing sources, providing rational, and sharing experiences to back up points. It is important to provide value rather than just selling your product or service.

Answers continue to be useful on Quora years after they are written. If you write answers that don’t “expire,” they will continue to be read and useful.

4. Answer your own question.

Don’t try to force your answer into a question if is not a good fit. You can add content that you want to share by answering your own questions.

Even if you answer your own question, your answer will have the benefits any answer does: distribution in feeds and digest emails to people who care about the topics, and access via search for future people who have that question.

5. Add unique and interesting details.

Anything unique or interesting you can offer is welcome. Personal stories of successes, failures, mishaps, or behind-the-scenes details perform well on Quora.

Anecdotes make your answers accessible and humanizing, which can help increase your Quora following.

6. Leverage your existing content.

Sharing previously written content gives it more mileage. All while contributing to your audience and influence on Quora.

If you re-purpose a blog post on Quora, make sure it genuinely answers the question. Do not simply link to an external page. Users should not have to leave Quora to find the answer to their question.

You can always add and answer your own question. This allows you to link back to your own site, re-use your content, and continue to grow your audience on Quora. Plus, this takes advantage of the strong SEO and evergreen lifecycle of Quora content distribution.

7. Find good questions to answer.

Understanding what questions you should answer will help you become a thought leader on Quora. Aim to find questions you can answer in less than 10 minutes. These are likely questions related to your industry and expertise.

You can start by answering highly followed questions. This ensures your answers get seen by people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say. This can also lead to further exposure since many Quora answers appear in Google searches or sometimes get picked up by the media.

You can also answer questions with followers but no answers. By being the first one to answer a question, you have a greater chance of having your answer listed first for that specific question.

Fill the “Knows About” topics on your profile.

• Add topics you would like to get questions about.
• Answer the questions you can provide a helpful answer to.

Have something specific you want to write about?

• Try taking questions on the header’s “Answer” tab.
• Taking questions notifies your followers (and topic followers) that you are taking questions about a specific subject.

Check out topic pages on Quora.

Click “Answer” to see all the questions associated with that topic.

Writing on Quora FAQs

What are the main policies on writing answers?

Be careful copying content and adding links.

• Answers with information copied from other sites should make this explicit by putting the copied content into block quotes preceded by a clear attribution of the source.

• An answer should be understood without having to leave Quora. Answers that cannot be understood without navigating to an external site, or appear to be doing so for promotional purposes, may be considered spam.

• Use images and videos only to make answers helpful. Answers that only contain images or videos should have captions to explain their relevance to the question asked.

How can I view analytics for my answers?

Quora offers analytics on your stats page. These show how all of your content is doing in terms of views, upvotes, and shares. These stats are available to track over time.

For more information on main policies and guidelines on writing answers, visit our Help Center.

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