Quora is a very hot answers service stirring some buzz lately, and in light of demand, this post covers the newest and fastest-growing social-networking start-ups around. In particular, we’ve focused on the most influential people using it and some of the more insightful tips available for new users.

“I agree that Yishan and Keith are influential here, but the most influential people are the Quora employees and admins who are ever-shaping every discussion that happens in these parts.

Curious who they are? See… Quora Admins: Who are the current site admins of Quora?”

A user voted ex-Facebook engineer Yishan Wong and Internet entrepreneur Keith Rabois to the list, but in conjunction with the user-submitted post above, Quora founder Charlie Cheeve, Quara employee Rebekah Cox and others were also voted.

In addition to the top influencers to the social answers service, a user should also get to know the actual site. That includes some helpful tips such as the site’s democratic voting system, the automatic linking feature appearing when speech marks are typed in etc. These come along with options to appear public or anonymous on a thread as well as search engines and so on.

“1. For a snapshot of recent notifications, hover your cursor over the home link at the top of the page (if you see a red notification count). You’ll see a few sentences of highlights (as shown in the above screenshot).

2. Questions can be voted up or down. Voting a question up makes it appear in your stream against your profile.

3. Voting a question up also shares that question with your followers.

4. To cancel out your vote up, click the up arrow again. Do not click down to cancel the up, this will in fact collapse the question meaning it will not appear in your stream.

5. You can be public or anonymous on a thread. The option to do this is in the top right of the screen when you are looking at a question. If you choose to be anonymous, all of your interaction with that question will be marked as ‘anonymous user’ instead of linking to your profile. Anonymity does not follow through to other questions though – it’s a question-by-question option.

6. You can link to topics or people simply by typing in speech marks in your question or answer, like this link to Public Relations. As you type, the options appear for your link.

7. Follow people and topics that are of interest to you as this will make your Quora browsing experience infinitely more personalised and useful.

8. For privacy, you can ask Quora to not allow search engines to index your profile – i.e. your name. This is simple to control, under settings at the top of the page. Also simple to find in the same section is the ‘deactivate your account link’ should you want to do that.

9. Quora is very democratic – answers to questions only appear in reverse-chronological order by default. As soon as they start getting votes from readers, they move up or down based on popularity. So always try to say something useful as opposed to braggy, and it will do the site and your usefulness on it wonders.

10. Fill out your profile in as complete a way as you can, because it is very search engine friendly. After under one month on Quora personally, my profile already appears in Google’s front page of search results for my name.”

In our previous coverage of Quora, our Editor in Chief Mark “RIzzn” Hopkins discussed the start-up in detail, expanding on its features and outlook.