February 23, 2011
The rise of the Q&A site, Quora, seems almost inexorable if you believe reports. The premise is a simple one. The site describes itself as “a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it”.
In some ways Quora is a social search engine. It allows you to ask a question to real people, instead of a search engine, and then wait as users provide answers using their knowledge, experience and opinions. The ultimate goal of Quora is that each answer page becomes the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about that specific question.
Who will use it and why?
Quora opened from private beta to the public in June 2010 and in the last 8 months it has grown extensively.
It has been claimed that Quora has broad enough appeal to rival Facebook and Twitter. However, despite these assertions, at the moment it does not seem to be proving attractive to the average internet user and it is still dominated by those in the tech, media and social media industries.
It is these groups that Quora is proving most useful to – journalists looking to gain insights on topics they are researching as well as those in the tech industry who need answers to specific questions. Recruiters will also be able to make great use of Quora as, by following their chosen industry and topics, they can find candidates more quickly than they can on LinkedIn.
This is the great benefit of Quora – the ability to search through a vast collection of previous answers and track the responses. This allows you to see who the experts are in your industry.
This functionality means that companies can use it to track what people are saying about them and to answer questions about their business. Following questions allows you to keep up with the conversation, keep track of the competition and monitor the responses publicly. It also means that you can establish expertise in your field and mark yourselves out as the number one in your industry.
The future
Some have claimed Quora will be bigger than Twitter, others that it has the potential reach of Facebook. However, Quora does not currently have a mainstream audience and cannot come close to rivalling either of these platforms at the present time.
2011 should see the focus of the site shift due to the growth of the site and the subsequent arrival of a lot more non-technological users – there will be a broader range of topics and the site will be less tech-centred. It certainly has the potential to provide a platform for discussions that many other social networks have found difficult to achieve and in this way can be much more useful to the average internet user than platforms such as Twitter.
The competition
It does have rivals. StackOverflow has established itself as the best site in terms of problem-solving-for-programmers and gains sixteen million unique visitors a month. Since then StackExchange has been launched – a collection of sites, each based on answering questions for different categories. In addition to this there are also Yahoo Answers, Cloudy, Answers.com and ChaCha, LinkedIn Answers, not to mention Facebook Questions which has been tagged the ‘Quora killer’.
So can 2011 be Quora’s year? Well, the SEO benefits are good, with results already starting to show up in Google. The high expectations and buzz around the site have seen a raft of new users. However, with more people signing up there may well be an increase in the volume of answers – but perhaps not in the quality and value. It will be interesting to see how Quora grows and whether it can deal with the clout of Facebook.
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