Chances are good that you’ve heard of Reddit, even if you’ve never visited it. It calls itself the “front page of the Internet” and indeed, a lot of content that is shared on other social media sites often originates on Reddit. But what is Reddit?
A Collection of Communities
Reddit is a social media site that is made up of smaller communities of like-minded users who create what are called subreddits. These subreddits can be created by anyone on any subject (so long as it meets the site’s guidelines). Users join these communities, where they can discuss topics and share relevant content from other social media sites with each other.
A Subreddit for Everyone
While the most trending posts are visible on Reddit’s main page, the real action for most users happens in the subreddits. The site is essentially one massive forum that’s divided into different topics where millions of users visit daily to share advice, tips, pictures, videos, posts, news, and more. Because the subreddits are created by users (and monitored by moderators), there’s a topic for almost everything imaginable: politics, news, popular tv shows, and books are among the more common, but the subjects can delve into the downright strange.
The Overlooked Platform
Despite its millions of users, Reddit is often overlooked when it comes to influence and marketing. There are hundreds of millions of unique visits every month. That’s a missed opportunity for many companies, however, as the site can actually drive a lot of business.
Uniqlo discovered this when 5% of the traffic to their website in the past year came from a subreddit entitled r/frugalmalefashion. All it took was for someone to mention it once for a discussion to begin and for users to share links to Uniqlo’s site, driving traffic there.
Reddit doesn’t often come up as a major social media platform, but it has a lot more power than many realize.
Marketing on Reddit
The first step towards successfully marketing with Reddit is to find the right subreddits. You can either look on Reddit itself or use Google to search for subreddits that fit your keywords and area of business. Anything within the same industry could be a potential lead, such as r/frugalmalefashion was for Uniqlo.
Posting on Reddit
If there are multiple subreddits that fit your company’s product or service, you can create a “multireddit”. A multireddit is a private channel that combines multiple subreddits into one, but only for you. This makes it easier to post across multiple subreddits at once.
Earning Karma
Before posting anything on a subreddit, it’s worth the time to research that subreddit to determine what kind of content resonates with its particular audience. The more popular your posts are, the higher they’ll appear in searches on Reddit. Similar to having high-ranking posts on Google, this process is called earning Karma on Reddit. The higher your Karma points, the higher-ranked your posts will be from the beginning.
It’s important to be careful that your posts aren’t too sales-y, however. Reddit has been notoriously anti-marketing and if your posts look too much like marketing, even if that’s what they actually are, that will quickly turn users away.