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.

If you have been checking your Twitter streams this past week, you will have noticed a fair few posts about a relatively new social media platform, Quora.

Quora is a real time collection of questions and answers which are created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. A cross between Yahoo! answers and Wikipedia, Quora offers a live, democratic network where topics are fleshed out in discussions by it’s users.

The platform allows users to follow users and topics they choose, with their front page compiling all questions relating to what they chose; questions they would also like to know the answer to, or those they themselves can answer. Questions are specific and often require expert opinions, or straight forward and reliable facts; so posts are given a topic, which is defined by the community itself. Followers of this topic, likely experts in that area, will then see the question in their feed. Answers are not limited to 140 characters like Twitter, and users can even blog their advice/opinions.

Twitter mentions of Quora started to accumulate last week after influencers began discussing the site more.  As a result, inboxes, and spam filters too, have been recently inundated with new followers on Quora; after users flocked to the site from seeing all the buzz. The reason for the huge influx of users recently seems to be down to the type of people using the network. Among others, there have been large number of media and technology communities joining in on conversations, who will typically have strong Twitter communities already in place, which show up when Quora highlights potential friendships using Twitter data.

With media and technology types joining the network, it is no surprise brands with business in these areas are being discussed. It looks like Quora could be 2011’s platform for discussing brands and posing difficult questions to them. Brands will need to take part on the network if they want to control what is being said about them. As users vote their favourite answers up the feed, those highest rated will be taken as most valid. Fortunately, we have seen answers by those working for the brand are the answers that get voted up quickly. This is exactly what brands should be doing; joining in, answering questions and taking ownership of posts about them.

Interesting reads:

• David Cushman’s opinion on the voting system on Quora : The real-time web vs the new edifices of information
• Adam Vincenzini’s initial thoughts on the service: Quora: Five challenges and solutions for brands
• Robert Scoble asks: Is Quora the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years?
• Join in with Drew’s discussion on Quora: What are your top tips for using Quora? 10 from me to star
• Rob Brown discusses how just one influencer could cause the increase: Quora and How to Become the ‘Next Big Thing’