I joined Quora just a few weeks ago, as I usually do with social networking sites I don’t know much about I like to join and explore to see what use they could be to me and more importantly for my clients.
I couldn’t find many people I knew on there the first week but found a couple of people to follow and they were kind enough to follow me back, then in the last 24 hours it seems to have gone crazy! Suddenly the gang are on there and my followers have doubled! (Still doesn’t equal a lot of followers but it is early days yet!)
What is Quora and should you be there?
Quora bills itself as “a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it.” They hope that “over time, the database of knowledge should grow and grow until almost everything that anyone wants to know is available in the system.”
So it’s a new, improved, system of the web itself, this company seems to be as ambitious as google and facebook!
Like facebook everything on Quora is tied back to a person. People use their real names and pictures on Quora and have a short bio describing who they are; this helps anyone reading things they write to understand why they should believe what is written and take into account the author’s perspective.
Basically it’s a place to ask and answer questions, a place to promote yourself as an expert in your field and to receive answers from others doing the same! To me this sounds an awful lot like the ‘answers’ section on LinkedIn. So why use Quora?
Well it’s still very early days but the way Quora organises things is a little different and that may lead to it to greater growth and use, right now it’s a site to dip into when your looking for an answer or have time to answer a few questions in your field of expertise. It’s got some way to go before being as effective as LinkedIn but it may well be worth watching this space.
http://www.quora.com/Gemma-Thompson
Social Media Illumination 