Social Media Marketing Tips for Reddit.com

Reddit is a community discussion and rating platform where participants vote content up and down. It was founded by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman in 2005. It calls itself the “front page of the internet” and lives up to that billing; Alexa ranks it as the sixth most visited site in the U.S. You can submit blog posts, images, audio, and original content. In fact, there is a separate link for original content on the front page.

According to Statista in 2017, the Reddit audience skews male (sixty-nine percent), and the majority were in the 18–29 age range (fifty-eight percent). If this is your audience, you need to look into what’s being shared here.

Marketing on Reddit

Should your company consider joining Reddit to become one of its “Redditors”? That depends on how much you want to spend time digging deeper and connecting with your niche audience. It’s likely that there’s an audience online that is discussing your topic. According to Statista, Reddit has:

• Five hundred and forty-two million monthly visitors; two hundred thirty-four million unique users) as of March 2019
• Over one hundred and thirty-eight thousand active communities
• Almost 1.6 billion visits to their online forum (from February 2018 to April 2019)

Reddit has gotten the interest of brands because it has a mass audience and marketers are eager to grab their attention. But, not surprisingly, marketing behavior is virtually shunned on Reddit. Therefore, figuring out the best way to participate as a company takes time and effort.

Determine whether you have the time to spend learning the rules and determine the best way to join the conversation. You don’t want to associate your company with inappropriate content and be banned.

To avoid being banned from Reddit, think about the following:

• You first goal is to understand the lay of the land. You want to find subreddits (threads) hat have content related to your business topic and determine how you want to participate in discussions.
• Think about adding value by doing things like answering questions. If you act like a marketer who only talks about their products, you won’t be welcome. You want to develop a community and serve them well.
• See how content is presented. Make sure not to use cheesy headlines or clickbait. The administrators can ban you.

Setting up on Reddit

To join Reddit, you have to register and verify your account. Here are a few important things to note:

• Username: You can’t change your username after you pick one, so give careful thought to your choice ahead of time.
• Rules: After your account is verified, you receive a welcome letter from Reddit that outlines acceptable behavior (reddiquette).
• Subscriptions: Reddit automatically subscribes you to fifty of the most popular subreddits when you join. Communities on Reddit are called subreddits. You can keep or delete them as you choose. All subreddits names start this way: reddit.com/r/ name.
• Premium: You can subscribe to a premium version of Reddit for $5.99 a month. This gives you an ad-free version, access to the r/lounge community, and seven hundred coins to spend each month. Coins are virtual tokens that can be used to show the writer of the content that their contribution is exemplary.
• Account: To view your account as others see it, go to your account.
• Search: To search subreddits type a term related to your business.

To keep up on the latest communities, you can find new subreddits as they are created.

Knowing Reddit lingo

When you join any community, it’s helpful to know the special terms used by its members. As a marketer, here are two you should know:

• Karma points: Karma points are earned by upvotes to your posts or comments. This is your currency. Other users can judge you by this, so pay attention to this metric.
• Shadow ban: If you violate the rules you may be shadow banned by the administrators. This means that no one else can see your account although you think your account looks fine.

Analyzing Reddit content

One of the reasons for participating on Reddit is to see the kinds of things others in your communities are writing about and how they’re using it. Here are two free/paid tools you can use to analyze subreddits users and determine how well your content is performing:

• Snoopsnoo is a free tool that lets you look at other member profiles to see how they’re using Reddit. You can see such things as how long they have been on the site, how long it’s been between postings, and their karma scores.
  Snoopsnoo.
• TrackReddit is a tracking tool that lets you set up alerts for topics (two are free). For example, you can monitor what’s being said on Reddit about a brand name or person.
  TrackReddit.