With the enormous amount of attention on social media and the large amount of content creation required to run a successful social marketing program, most companies opt to do nothing more than secure their brand with top social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.  However, there is a little known social arena that will help your company become authoritative industry leaders with very little time spent each month on content creation.

Q&A websites such as FormSpring, Quora, StackOverflow and the new TED Conversations offer a unique way for your company to brand itself using questions your customers ask everyday.  Since you’re already answering these questions, it takes very little effort to archive these, put them into text format and publish them for the rest of the world to see.  These sites can be real timesavers for companies with small customer service departments by acting as a knowledge base that you can direct customers to.

Concerned that these sites may not have relevant categories for questions relating to your industry?  Don’t be.  Our research has shown that almost every industry is covered – everything from sales and marketing to travel, from education to workplace safety.  There’s something for everyone.  And, like I mentioned above, every question/answer you post can be reposted within Facebook, Twitter and other top social sites and can include links to your website or back to the Q&A sites.  This is a great method for developing link popularity and social authority, two primary algorithms used in determining the ranking positions of your keywords.

Several of these platforms also allow for discussions to be carried on further by your viewing audience, which works to your advantage and gives you the ability to interact with industry influencers.

Here’s What You’ll Need to Get Started

Start developing an extensive list of common questions and your responses to those.  If you’re response includes product or service solutions offered by your company, include a relevant link to the product/service on your website.