What is Reddit?

If you’ve ever typed in a question to Google, chances are a Reddit link will pop up on the first page with an answer. Structured in a forum-style layout, Reddit is an accumulation of social news, content ratings, and discussions. It’s a place where people can go for advice and answers to specific problems. 

Users don’t hold back — they share questions, experiences, and even intimate life stories. Different from its social feed counterparts like Instagram or TikTok, Reddit stands out as a digital community space that genuinely aims to connect people with shared interests. With up to 52 million daily users, Reddit offers many opportunities for marketing research and understanding both broad and niche audiences, and it’s an authentic source from the consumer perspective. 

How Does Reddit Work?

Interests are primarily distinguished through communities called subreddits, formatted as r/topic. Users create new subreddits daily – there are currently 2.8 million subreddits with 430 million global monthly users. 

Reddit content is driven by its users. They submit questions, links, text posts, images, and more that belong to subreddits. Each post shared can be upvoted, meaning the user likes the content, or downvoted, indicating they did not like the content. 

Like Instagram, the more a piece of content is liked (called upvoted) or engaged with, the higher in the algorithm the post will be, making it more visible to users as the content is being well received by other users. The more content is downvoted, the less it’s seen as it moves down on the list. 

Getting started

When you’re first getting started on Reddit, the site will give you options to customize your experience by picking discussion board interests, personalizing your profile, and providing an option to create a custom feed. From there, it’ll serve you content that best suits your interests. To personalize your experience even more, you will need to start joining subreddits and interact through votes and comments. 

Importance of comments

Comments are another main driver of the platform. Because comments contribute value and are many times the most interesting engagement between users, it’s one of the most critical aspects when becoming a Redditor and finding your fit within subreddit communities. This is also important because Reddit takes spam seriously. If users aren’t utilizing interactions on the platform, repeatedly taking unsolicited actions, or manipulating votes they could be considered spam accounts. Spammers are shunned in the Reddit world, so don’t be like a bot. 

How Reddit Social Media Management Can Help Your Business 

Reddit is a gold mine for consumer behaviors, interests, conversations, experiences, and communities. It’s not hard to find what you are looking for when you are leveraging the platform the way it was intended to be used. As marketers, we are always looking for better ways to reach our audience or meet them where they’re at, and Reddit is a great avenue to take to get there. 

Reddit can help your business in a variety of ways, including targeting audiences, social listening, brand awareness, and more. 

1) Target audience

With hundreds of thousands of communities on Reddit, there are relevant options for any industry. Finding your target audience can be as easy as a simple search to in-depth research. You can use subreddits, interests, and locations to discover communities your brand best matches. 

For example, if you’re a fashion brand looking to make business changes evolving the environment and sustainability, then a good place to start would be a sustainable fashion subreddit like r/SustainableFashion. Comment sections will have real-life input from people who are living a sustainable lifestyle, those seeking knowledge of sustainable fashion, or how people perceive sustainable fashion. 

Keep in mind that reading through comments might not give you the straight answer you’re looking for, but it gives a better feel and understanding of reactions and conversations to niche or general categories. Another bonus to using Reddit is their advertising targeting is pretty similar to other social networks we use regularly. Some of those elements include: 

• Targeting by location — U.S. advertisers can narrow by country, then state level 
• Targeting based on interest — the option to target users who recently engaged with specific content categories (ex. Art & design, entertainment, business & finance, gaming, food/beverage, etc.) 
• Targeting through subreddit — include subreddits that are relevant to your market and have been recently interacted with by users. Note that if a subreddit isn’t populating during the targeting process,  it’s likely that the desired subreddit has too low of volume to reach eligibility for targeting.
• Targeting by device — depending on the campaign, you might want to target desktop vs. mobile or include both as an option. 
• Time of day targeting — whether you want to reach the early birds or night owls, Reddit has the option to target ads during specific times that are then displayed in the users’ timezone. 

2) Social listening

Social listening is an incredible tool, and if you want to be a fly on the wall absorbing information, then Reddit is your wall. You can social listen by setting up keywords within your listening tools and letting the tool do the work to pull brand mentions and sentiment around those mentions. People are extremely candid on Reddit. This candid environment brings an opportunity for authentic insights into how people feel, think, and relate around your brand on the platform.

Through social listening, you can recognize patterns of conversations and feedback, good or bad. If you are researching our brand, you can find those brand patterns while also identifying consumer patterns by analyzing similarities within comments and votes.  

3) Brand awareness

Reddit has such a large volume of users that it can be right at our fingertips when wanting to bring awareness to our brand. Reddit Ads will be getting your advertisements in front of more people. Leveraging SEO can also increase your content’s visibility. Brands can specify what communities they want to advertise to, which might be groups that they haven’t had a prior engagement with to open up new opportunities. Another way to create brand awareness, like on Instagram, is by creating your own branded account to then enter into conversations from. 

4) Create and engage your community

Reddit is, simply put, all about engagement. Engagement is keeping the Reddit world going around, and with so many conversations happening at any hour of the day, there are plenty of opportunities to engage directly with those users. Start by making a branded account and using it to enter relevant subreddits. From there, you can ask for feedback from users and answer any questions they might have. Brands can create a specific brand subreddit encouraging consumers to interact and also providing brand transparency by posting updates or questions to the subreddit created. 

Like other platforms, users are looking to be acknowledged when using Reddit, so why not be the one who acknowledges them? Especially when users have the ability to interact anonymously. It’s authentic and transparent and allows for trust to be built. 

5) Generate leads

Generating leads on Reddit takes many forms. Creating an account, engaging with subreddits, and advertising on the platform are all ways to generate leads. Brands who are creating their own subreddits can host an AMA (ask me anything), giving users a direct location to ask their questions, which in turn gives the brands potential leads. Leads can also come from identifying the purchase intent of users based on interactions on the platform. 

Are You Ready to Use Reddit? 

If you have the internet, a topic in mind, and fingers to type, you’re ready for Reddit! Reddit is a platform for everyone, allowing space for people to be themselves. So as a brand, be your brand persona, adhere to the Reddit rules (remember the mention of spam?), and be a student of the platform. Allow yourself to go down the Reddit-rabbit-hole and discover things your brand might not know or strengthen what your brand does know. 

If you made it to the end and are unsure if your brand is ready for Reddit, that’s okay because we’re ready to help get you there — book a chat with us at ICUC, a 24/7 community management agency, today.