Q&A Websites to Establish Business Reputation
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Q&A websites provide an excellent opportunity to build a positive business reputation. Answer user questions, build relationships and become an expert in your field.
Online reputation is crucial for any business. Buyers who trust businesses are more likely to buy from them. Traditionally when buying goods or services buyers look for businesses with a good reputation which often translates to a strong brand. The same applies online, especially when shopping for information products buyers will look for known names and are more likely to buy from businesses that have demonstrated this expertise.
Building Reputation with Q&A Sites
One great way of building online reputation is by answering user questions on Q&A sites such as Yahoo Answers or LinkedIn. If you have enough traffic to your site you could also consider setting up a Q&A platform, where every question answered not only builds business reputation but also great quality content. In this case remember that Q&A sites drive traffic on the long tail of search. Users are likely to type three or more words in search queries.
Establish Business Reputation: Popularity of Q&A sites
Q&A sites often appear on SERPs linked to long tail search queries. As a result usage of Q&A sites is relatively high considering many searchers don’t begin their search on a Q&A site, but on a search engine such as Google.
In a rececent survery 49% of companies that use social media said they ask questions on Q&A sites. Only 29% said they use Twitter to find business-related information. The 49% doesn’t even include the many who get info from Q&A sites by Googling or Binging.
How useful are Q&A sites for B2B reputation building?
The table below shows that a large proportion of business users who use Q&A sites do find that it helps them do their jobs more effectively. This suggests that it is the ideal venue to build reputation among the business community.
Establish Business Reputation: Using Q&A sites
Q&A sites is as much about building relationships as it is answering questions. The aim here is to build trust and become an expert in your field. Think about how you can drive traffic back to your website with your answers but be careful to avoid the hard sell. Look at sites such as LinkedIn but also Twitter. Although surveys suggest that Twitter is used less for Q&As it is easier to start a conversation on twitter. For example if someone tweets that they are stuck installing Wordpress, you could send them a link to your website containing helpful advice.
