If your business is engaging, attentive and active, you’ll develop understanding, trust and repeat business.
What’s a Q&A site?
Q&A sites are a very popular and effective way of reaching your customers and consumers. Through Q&A sites, users are able to post questions about their problems or concerns, and get answers from the internet community.
These sites were initially set up for communication between individuals, but businesses have recently started answering and interacting via these platforms in order to help out people who might potentially become customers and clients.
If your company can provide the answers and information that people are asking for, then you’re able to prove the type of value that your company can offer – and build up your reputation.
Blueadz.com point to the fact that this type of interaction can also guide traffic to your site and boost you SEO via backlinks. It also allows you to interact with your target audience in a more honest, intimate way.
Which Q&A sites are best?
There are now two main popular channels for internet users to ask their questions to a wide and varied audience:
- Quora: a site dedicated exclusively to questions and answers, this site has around 200 million visits a month. Clearly a good place to interact with plenty of confused consumers.
- Reddit: though this platform isn’t specifically geared towards questions and answers, it’s a discussion-based website that features an abundance of queries. Reddit receives 1.5 billion visits a month.
Both of these sites can be used by businesses who want to reach a wider audience. Any business of any type can find an unanswered question in order to interact and build communities.
How do businesses build these communities?
Here are a few examples:
- Digital communication company Drift shares information and knowledge via Quora. Drift often interact by answering questions in depth and providing links to their own existing blog posts. This is a great, honest, open way to direct people to their site.
- Modern Imprint answer questions in a similar way, but have also set up their own corporate account on Quora so that users know exactly who they’re interacting with.
- Hubspot have created their own subreddit on Reddit, to allow users to share information and ask questions directly to Hubspot themselves – and other Hubspot users.
If you can connect your business to your potential customers – and link those potential customers to one another – you can build trusted communities and trusted relationships.
One of the best ways to build a bigger customer base is by building a reputation as a trusted, reliable business. And answering questions through Reddit and Quora is one of the best ways to do that.
Although these interactions use time and talent, the ROI can be huge. Not only will you build trust, you’ll also build brand loyalty, as customers will be keen to repay your kindness by sticking with your services.
Customers have no loyalty towards brands who don’t pay attention to them. But if your business is engaging, attentive and active, you’ll develop understanding, trust and repeat business.