Quora Questions/Answers Ratio is the New Following/Followers Ratio?

Remember when Twitter was taking off, and there was a lot of debate about the importance of following back some % of your followers… and not following disproportionately more or less than were following you? It was an interesting way of gauging influence, or desperation for followers in a lot of cases. It also became a useful way for identifying spammers.

Are Quora Answers the New Twitter Followers?

With Quora taking off (yes I’m addict), I’ve been getting a huge influx of followers and I’ve been trying to figure out how to follow people back. On each peson’s profile you get a little bit of data about how they’re using Quora – including three things that are really useful:

1. # of Answers
2. # of Mentions
3. # of Questions

I listed those in the order of which are most important to me.  The way I think about it, answering a question is the most time consuming thing you can do on Quora and suggests real engagement.  Mentions aren’t much work on the part of the user, but are harder to come by (mostly famous people seem to have these right now). Number of questions is least important to me, afterall it is easy to ask a question.  You also don’t get much “credit” for asking good questions in Quora (yet).

I wonder how long until Klout is using this metric to help evaluate how influential various people are in social media.

Oh and btw, check out my ANSWERS on Quora, some of them could easily be a blog post.