5 Tips for Branding on Quora

Whether you’re strictly an online entrepreneur like me, or you use online marketing and sales methods to support your offline empire, we all know the branding power that popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Quora can offer. Though, quite strangely, I often find myself talking with entrepreneurs who have no idea just how effective Quora can be.

Yes, it’s VERY effective!

Quora is Yahoo Answers, circa 2014. Quora is what YA could have been, had they taken the same steps Quora has to verify a user’s identity and promote a community of professionalism and maturity. You won’t find “trainerdude1026” on Quora, telling people how to lose weight in 10 words or fewer, then linking to their personal training website.

I won’t go into the many factors that led to the death of the once-popular Yahoo Answers: trolls looking to degrade and hurt people, lazy fool-hardy online marketers looking for an easy way to link to their service, a poor user-feedback system, and a moderation system that makes up rules as they go along. These and many other factors all led to the yet unofficial death of YA.

If you’re a shady entrepreneur, go back to YA!

If you think you’re going to go on Quora and start plugging your shady service or product under a veil of Internet secrecy, you’re sadly mistaken. The community will eat you alive with downvotes and the administrators will catch on to the scam sooner or later.

If you’re a legitimate authority within the service or product category you offer, it’s a great place to brand your business, attract new clients, perform market research, and network with like-minded entrepreneurs and experts that can help you further your business’s bottom line.

Here’s 5 tips you can use to maximize your branding efforts on Quora.

1. Spelling, grammar & language count

It’s essential to use perfect (or near-perfect) grammar, definitely ensure proper spelling, avoid profanity or other offensive language, and proofread carefully. I could (but won’t) point to several mistake-ridden posts on Quora as of late that while meaningful and sincere, make the person answering look very unprofessional.

An expert in any given topic may not be the best “grammatician” on the planet, but they can certainly make an effort to right-click on the words with little red lines under them and select the correct spelling!

Offensive language: obviously racial slurs and sensitive religious or political references are a no-no.

Last, proofreading only takes a minute, and you never know who’ll be turned off by obvious mistakes that most people make when rushing a post out without a second glance at what they’ve written.

2. Have a nice photo of yourself posted in profile

We all know the importance of real pictures when it comes to branding. If cartoon faces are part of your brand, then using one as a profile pic might work from a branding perspective. Otherwise, treat Quora like you should treat Facebook or Twitter. Get a clear (properly resized, if necessary) picture to post, then watch people instantly start to take you seriously, over those who use the default blue/gray shadow picture.

Link to your other social accounts that also contain real pictures of you, to further cement the fact that you are indeed the person pictured in your Quora profile. This is trust-building 101.

3. Fill out the bio section

Tell people where you live, where your business is located, education, employment history, and professional experience. So many people put “marketing expert”, “health and fitness professional”, etc., into their byline description, but when you get to their profile they have nothing listed.

You might think that you’re just playing around a bit, to see what sort of leads or authority you can build on Quora, but why would anyone think that way? Why wait until later? Part of becoming an authority – someone folks can trust and turn to when they need well meaning advice – is establishing your credentials.

4. Proper formatting will get you extra branding points

Formatting means the difference between getting your posts upvoted and shared, or simply ignored. Short, crisp sentences make it a lot easier for people to follow your ideas.

Change paragraphs when you’re introducing a new point or idea. Add bullet-point and numbered lists will make it much easier for people to skim through your answer. Bold, italics and underlining will emphasize keywords and phrases that you want readers to pay special attention to.

Basic formatting skills are something that anyone who engages people with written content needs to know. Learn more from this problogger post.

5. Time isn’t on your side with the Quora crowd

If you’re an obsessive-compulsive type, this essential Quora tip shouldn’t be a problem for you.

Monitor the categories you’re answering questions in, looking for great questions that will help you brand yourself or your business, or just general questions to add to your credibility, then answer them ASAP!

The reason being two things: 1) Whether it be regular people or other businesses, someone is bound to answer the question quickly, perhaps with the same information you’d share. 2) If the asker gets the answer they’re looking for, they, or even someone else who’s reading the question can mark the answer as “best source” meaning that a later post given by you may not get read at all.

Ready to Get Started?

Check out Quora’s FAQ page if you’ve never used it before. It’ll tell you everything you need to know about setting up your profile, feeds, how to post and answer questions, and general guidelines about how to put together answers to get views.