One of the fundamentals of online reputation management is establishing a prominence for your brand online and the first stop for most here is social media. Social media profiles can and do rank highly in search engines for brand searches and names, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook in particular.
Recently I've been using Quora and have found this site to have incredible online reputation potential.
In summary, it’s a question and answer style platform that integrates some of the Twitter-esque ‘following’ elements. You can follow users and topics to help you to find the questions you are most likely to be interested in and can even sign up through Facebook and Twitter and connect with contacts from those platforms on Quora.
It was interesting to see how quickly Quora started ranking for my name:
Granted, ranking for my name is hardly the Holy Grail of achievements in SEO terms but I'm on Twitter, I guest post on a number of blogs frequently and am active on several social networks, so for this one to appear in the top 10 after a relatively small amount of activity (I have answered some 30 questions and asked just 2) is fast and effective.
But the real benefit in online reputation terms isn’t in its ranking alone. It’s in the profile you can build. Users coming across your Quora profile when searching for you will often come across answers you have given to questions. This presents an opportunity for those who:-
- Answer questions in their “specialist,” areas.
- Answer questions fully with well thought out and structured answers.
- Provide information other users can benefit from.
Essentially, it’s an opportunity for you to show off all your shiny knowledge in a way that can potentially benefit people. You’re sharing information with people who have specifically asked for it on a platform that is then visible to a global audience.
Stamp Your Authority Sooners Rather Than Later
Quora is growing quickly.
At this stage it’s still small enough that the really well thought out answers stand out in many topic areas. Some topics remain entirely unexploited.
So now is the time to get in there and build your profile!