Create Your Question and Answer Website like Quora

The activity feed is great for showcasing highly contextual, relevant, and interesting content to the members. This is displayed on the home page and gives prompts to the members to follow different topics and other users. When members follow topics and other members the feed learns about the user preferences and shows more personalized content.

It is very easy to follow topics that are of interest to the member. Quora automatically displays and topics to follow right after signing up and users can follow different topics later on as well. There is also a “related questions” section on the right side which suggests questions similar to the one user is reading currently. This way the members can explore additional content conveniently.

When members come across answers that they found useful, they can upvote on the answer which affects the ranking of the answer as well. They can also add their comments to the answers if they would like to provide additional context or have any questions related to the answer.

This is a great feature of Quora - you can post the content created on Quora on other social media sites (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) which can further amplify the visibility of the content. The content can also be embedded in other sites via Quora widgets.

Spaces are essentially groups and sub-communities on Quora where members with similar interests congregate. Members need to follow the spaces that they find interesting. Spaces allow the members to post questions, links, and start discussions via a rich text editor. These groups act as a powerful channel to build valuable networks between the members which further amplifies the stickiness of the site.

Search functionality on Quora is really powerful -- as you type your query, you would get extensive suggestions from different sections of the site (ranging from topics to spaces). Of course, you can freely run a query to get all the results and ask a question as well directly from the search box. Quora even suggests the right persons to get answers from based on the data they have on different members.

The user profile collects and stores important information related to the member. Members can write a description, showcase their expertise, work experience, education, upload photo, etc. This helps other members learn more about different members and connect.

You can initiate direct conversations with other members of the community on a private channel. This is helpful when you would like to discuss anything that is private in nature or probably would like to move the connection to the channels such as email or LinkedIn.

Community engagement drives member retention and improves the lifetime value of the users. Highly engaged users spend more time of the website, refer other users to join the platform, and work towards creating high-quality content. In case your business model is based on advertising, this can be pivotal -- more users, more traffic, more time spent on the site, and more revenue.

Some of the common tactics to keep users engaged is to provide high-quality and interesting content based on the user profile whenever the user logs in. Topics, spaces, members followed are all great signals. Leverage related questions to further engage users and use gamification techniques (reputation scores, leaderboards, and badges) to keep the members motivated to contribute to your website.

You should be able to reach your members with relevant information to bring them back to your website. One simple technique is to send content digest whenever a relevant content emerges in your website. For instance, if a member is interested in stock trading, you could send a digest with content from this topic with a high number of upvotes and answers. Of course, when someone comments, posts answer, or suggests improvements the notification should be able to get the user back to the site.

You should be able to send push notifications and message them via messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Slack, etc. if they have connected their profiles. This ensures that regardless of the channel of which the member is available, your platform is accessible for interaction and content contribution.

New age social networks come with a beautiful design that is based on modern user behavior and familiar features of popular social media sites. The platform on which you would build the Q&A community must adhere to newer design practices. It should also be completely customized according to your brand guidelines -- right from logo and color combinations to complex CSS modifications.

Your website must have robust moderation capabilities -- it should allow you to blacklist list keywords and automatically put the content with such keywords in the moderation queue. Also, the members should be empowered to report any inappropriate content and spammers. Apart from this, you should have the capability to define a minimum reputation score requirement for the members before they post content.