PR Week’s in-depth feature last month on the newest hot social network, Quora, asked the question: is it the next Twitter?
Having spent four months on Quora, my experience of it is much different to that of Twitter, even in Twitter’s early days when things there were much quieter. Quora is, in many ways, more like LinkedIn than Twitter. The content is valuable but lighter in volume and looks more like a long tail than a swarm.
Quora’s long tail of content provides an ongoing stream of interaction from an extended social network, from people who you probably do not know but who you have shared interests with.
Once you follow a thread on Quora, you will receive alerts, usually via email, whenever people post a new comment to that thread. The end result is that, even if you only follow a handful of topics that take your fancy, you get a slow but steady stream of interesting discussions coming through to you in a way that looks and feels a lot like the value you get from being a member of a good LinkedIn Group.
You can use Quora in a Twitter-like way, by surfing the live feed on your homepage on Quora.com, but as more and more people begin to graze, Quora is visibly slowing down and its long tail does seem to be adding more value to the community than how it looked at first.
If you have any interests that you’ve chosen to follow through by joining a LinkedIn Group, then try looking up the same interests on Quora and see what this grazing long tail of interestingness looks like, and let us know if you think it works for you or not. We think Quora will be here to stay, and the fact that it’s a slow-burner will be to its advantage.
