Social Media Evolution: Is Quora The New Twitter?
Posted by Aleesha Tully on Thu, May 12, 2011
As the Social Media world 
seems to be entering another cycle of evolution, we are wondering if Twitter will ever be replaced? Remember Bebo, anyone? It is no secret that the platform was overtaken by Facebook a few years ago. Quora surfaced a few months ago, as a new Q&A platform in beta. People were confused to begin with, but then started to catch on to the simple concept. Quora defines itself as being “a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it”. Perhaps you think you’ve heard of this concept before- remember “Ask Jeeves”?
Make sure you have a marketer that has it’s fingers on the pulse of the online marketing evolution. SiliconCloud can perform a free social media evaluation by our expert team.
The Social Media Question And Answer Model
But Quora is different, and has grown in popularity over the last number of months and is now open for anyone to try out (originally it was an invitation-only service). The main reason it is exciting for business is now that Quora has changed its policy to allow self-promotional answers. Does it sound like Twitter yet? Quora fans are now having strong debates on the subject – does the new policy mean good or bad things for the Q&A platform? There are arguments for and against, but in the hands of a good marketer, Quora will now surely be a viable tool in the Social Media fold.
Some argue that Quora will run into similar problems as Twitter has experienced – the plague of spammers. We are hoping that there will be filters put in place to allow genuine relevant self-promotional answers and to filter out the automated spam. Much like Twitter, this could make or break the platform. While Twitter does suffer from spam attacks, users can generally avoid seeing too much spam and will often find useful links and advice through the social media platform.
What Does Quora Mean For Online Marketing For Business?
We are excited by the developments at Quora, and what they can mean for a new medium to market relevant content and advice to people who are using the platform. Google is now indexing Quora though real-time search, so there wil be incentive for spammers to hit Quora, but also more incentive for good online marketers to interact with Quora users and create positive results. Let’s hope Quora filtering and management is good enough to keep spam out and avoid getting onto Google’s “content farm” list!
Make sure you have a marketer that has it’s fingers on the pulse of the online marketing evolution. SiliconCloud can perform a free social media evaluation by our expert team.