Quora Blogs – The Newbie on the Block

Q&A social networking site Quora has caught the BlogSpace with surprise, launching its new blogging platform, expecting that it will allow more users to share their in-depth knowledge about topics that intrigue and fascinate them. The company has also launched a first-of-its-kind “Mobile Rich Text editor” App for IPhone users that gives full control over formatting texts and photos to allow for expressive mobile blogging and answering.

It is not the first time; Quora has tried to incorporate a Blog-like Feature. In 2010, Quora founders described Quora Posts as “answers without questions”. Since then, it was used like a blogging platform by some for re-sharing their blog posts on their boards. Quora has now converted all the boards into Blogs.

Fundamentally, blogging on Quora isn’t much different from what millions normally do. It tells us that it’s just the same distribution system, but a different writing mechanism. The layout of the blog is simple and is focused on reading more than style. The best part is that you can add multiple ready-made tags or categories in the form of “Post Topic”.

Till now, mobile phones have been a one-sided knowledge sharing experience with it being just good enough for reading but not for writing. In present state, it turns out to be painstaking for anyone to compose a lengthy email or message and send it to someone since there is no way to  incorporate bulleting, text formatting, inserting images, and much more. Quora has recognized this need and with its iPhone update, users will be able to access these features through the tap of a button.

With this update, the company has eliminated two key problems that people face: Lack of Distribution and Poor editing tools.

Let’s now discover how the new blogging platform is going to impact the various stakeholders.

Bloggers with Minimal following
With time, Quora has gained reputation of an insular social network populated by highly educated, specialized users that are passionate and expressive about what they do. For the most active contributors/writers, the views can be quite enormous. In the span of a year, most writers receive between 300,000 to 400,000 views while the most active writers receive up to 1 million views. These are huge numbers for “Less-established Writers” struggling to make a mark with their blogs. Therefore, Quora’s blog service turns out to be the ideal place for “users with no particular audience”.

Brands-Marketers
The new blog service might just be a long term move to woo brands and eventually, develop a monetization strategy. Till now, brands have been reluctant to use this medium, as it can be time consuming for brand-marketer, given the level of thought and detail that goes into the information sharing on a platform like Quora. At the moment, Quora doesn’t allow brands to create profiles, but companies such as JetBlue Airways and Virgin America have managed to create a presence by responding to questions in the Q&A section. Brands can also consider blogging on Quora, if they are fundamentally built on its expertise about a specific subject matter.

Other Blogging Platforms
When Marketing-Lead of Quora, Mark Bodnick claims “If you’ve written a high-quality post, we will get you the readers”. Then, it tells something about the confidence Quora adjures banking on its 10 million registered user base. The move by Quora to shift its focus from a “Questions & Answers content network” to a “digital media publishing platform” will make top blogging platforms like WordPress, Tumblr, and Subvtle to re-examine their strategy and contain its current users from drifting to Quora’s Blog service. The Obvious Corp Company, Medium has already expressed its desire to offer distribution for good writing.

On the whole, Quora Blogs will revitalize the company. The company could get Average Joes and Big-name Writers to promote their blogs in order to bring an influx of readers to it’s incredible collection of knowledge. Evidently, it seems to be the first step as an attempt to diversify its focus and shore up activity on the site