Why should businesses care about Quora – 7 questions answered

Ever heard of Quora? It was founded by two former Facebook employees ten years back. It’s growing fast and expanding into new markets. What exactly is Quora? What are the opportunities for businesses? And should you, too, get involved? Read on to find out. We had an opportunity to chat with Quora’s Evangelist, JD Prater.

Toni: For those of our readers that don’t know much about Quora, how would you describe the platform (and its mission, long-term goals) shortly?

JD: Quora is a knowledge sharing platform. And the way that we organize and share knowledge is through questions and answers. It’s one of the largest online communities for questions and answers, as well as one of the highest quality user-generated content platforms.

But we have a long way to go. The vast majority of human knowledge is still not on the Internet. It’s in our heads, in books, in magazines, in conferences we attend, and in the conversations we’re having with people every day. We want to make all that knowledge available to everyone on the Internet.

To get knowledge out of people’s heads and onto the Internet, where it can live as evergreen content, is really difficult. It’s a lofty goal, but we know that knowledge changes lives.

Toni: So Quora is growing fast. How many users are there now globally, and in Finland?

JD: Over the last three years Quora has experienced rapid growth. There are now over 300 million unique visitors coming to Quora every month and we are not slowing down in 2019. Most people don’t realize that 300 million is only for our English language silo. We haven’t reported our audience metrics from other language silos. And with 16 languages other than English, you can expect updated audience numbers coming later this year as we continue to grow.

One of the major reasons for our growth is our organic flywheel. Knowledge on Quora is shared exponentially. It starts with users browsing and asking questions. Experts answer those questions and if they’re deemed to be helpful, the community upvotes the answers. With high-quality answers being written, new users are drawn to the site, who then read answers and ask questions.

Toni: One thing I love about Quora is that you can read (and provide) in-depth answers to specific questions. Great for users. But why should advertisers take note? What does Quora offer that other ad platforms don’t?

JD: Quora is growing its audience size which should be enough to put it on the radar of most marketers. But quantity isn’t the real reason to advertise on Quora, intent and context is.

Because the platform is centered around answering questions, Quora’s visitors show very high intent. People come to Quora to research, learn, and share knowledge which makes it a very different audience from other social media platforms. Our audience is leaned in and actively engaged as they learn rather than passively scrolling because they’re bored.

Our audience is in the middle of a knowledge journey, perhaps all the way down the sales funnel to the decision point. This makes Quora a place where marketers can reach their audience at their most influenceable moment in the buyer’s journey.

Toni: Quora clearly has appeal to the knowledge-hungry internet users. Are there any notable demographic or psychographic biases in the makeup of the user base? (Like Pinterest, where 80% of users are female)

JD: Our audience is curious and eager to engage with new ideas, adding millions of new questions and answers to Quora every month. Here are some statistics from the US.

Audience

• Near parity across gender with 57% of our audience being male and 43% is female
• We have an educated audience with 65% report having a college degree and 28% report having a graduate degree
• Our audience is high-value with 54% reporting an annual household income greater than $100K

Engagement

• Device usage is 75% mobile
• Our audience spends 30 mins/day on the app (That’s 2x more than LinkedIn)
• Millions of questions and answers are added every month

Quora offers a diverse audience engaging across many topics. In 2018, Entertainment, Travel, Everyday Life, Learning, Business and Technology were just some of our most popular topic areas. We invite you to explore our 2018 topics infographic and reach your target audience by advertising on Quora in 2019.

Toni: We’ve been attempting to also have Finnish ads approved, but so far Quora only supports English. Is there any workaround for this?

JD: Currently, Quora Ads are only available in English. We will eventually offer advertisers the ability to create ads in other languages sometime in 2020.

Toni: What do you think are the most common pitfalls that advertisers should look out for on Quora?

JD: Before joining Quora, I also advertised on the platform. I got a few things wrong in the beginning so I advise advertisers to avoid seven mistakes.

1. Incorrect/unusual use of capitalization and abbreviations
2. Not duplicating ads to streamline ad creation
3. Not importing keywords to find topics
4. Starting too broad, then not knowing what’s working
5. Not excluding irrelevant questions
6. Bidding too low and not winning the auction
7. Not paying attention to potential weekly impressions

I wrote in more detail about how you can avoid these mistakes over on Marketing Land.

Toni: What’s in the pipeline for Quora?

JD: We’ve heard from users that they would love the ability to respond to questions as the brand to help build credibility and expertise around the company.

Right now, users are answering questions as an employee of the company. This is challenging for a business when employees leave the company, don’t want to be in the spotlight as the answerer, or may not have the technical expertise to answer the question.

To help remedy some of these issues, we plan on launching Business Accounts on Quora. Marketers will have the chance to answer questions as the brand rather than an employee of the company. Look for an announcement coming this summer.

So there you have it. Thank you, JD.

Should you and your business get involved? It’s very early days in Finland, and early adopting does provide interesting opportunities for businesses with English-language websites (currently).

If you’re doing business in the US market you definitely should get involved. Feel free to reach out to me if you’re interested to get started. 📈

And if you want to stay up-to-date with Quora, follow JD on Twitter.