Of course you’ve heard of Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, and hopefully your company already has a presence on all of them as part of your social media marketing strategy. But one social media platform you may not have heard of and that can be great for small businesses is Quora. Quora is a question and answer site written, edited and organized by users. Now, don’t just picture Yahoo! Answers and write this one off. The users on Quora have developed real community and offer up relevant, substantive answers. For this reason, it’s also a great place to keep an eye on your industry.

One reason you may not have heard about Quora before is that they used to have a policy against self-promotion by users. That meant that if you posted an answer touting the merits of your company, it was very likely to get deleted. However, on Friday they announced the elimination of that policy, opening up the doors to a huge opportunity for marketers.

Why are we mentioning this on an SEO blog? Well, in late April TechCrunch noted that Google had added Quora answers to its Realtime search results. So in addition to driving traffic directly to your site through links you post in answers, posting in Quora can give your company more visibility on Google SERPs, as well. We’d suggest you check it out.