How To Use Reddit Marketing To Promote Your Business

Reddit is one of the most underestimated and underutilized social media marketing platforms out there. As a business, you shouldn’t ignore the potential of the platform to generate a generous stream of traffic to your website or blog or to communicate B2B.

From this article, you’ll find out:

1. What Reddit is and the potential of the platform to generate targeted traffic to your business, website, or blog.

2. How to use and post on Reddit and to create a good brand presence on the platform. 

3. How to build an online community on Reddit.

What Is Reddit?

Often dubbed as ‘the front page of the internet’, Reddit is both a discussion forum and a content and news aggregation website. It’s a place where thousands of people meet to share content and news in the form of images, posts, or links. These posts are usually organized into user-created boards known as subreddits which cover a multitude of topics from users such as video games, music, food, news, etc. Other members can also comment on other peoples’ posts while up-voting or down-voting posts. A post’s visibility is determined by the number of upvotes or downvotes it gets.

Therefore, only the most popular posts within each subreddit will appear on the front page, especially to those browsing without an account. Posts that don’t receive a lot of upvotes are commonly filtered out by members. Users can also earn “karma” for their posts and comments. “Karma” represents the member’s position within the Reddit community due to their contributions. In addition to posting, commenting, and voting, registered users can also create their subreddits. As of January 2019, almost 1.65 billion users accessed the site, with the U.S. accounting for the largest share of desktop traffic, followed by the U.K. and Canada.

Potential Of Using Reddit During Social Media Activities

According to data from ExpandedRamblings, they reported the value of Reddit as $1.8 billion. It has an estimated 330 million users hailing from about 217 countries. It also has around 853,824 subreddits along with around 150,000 Reddit communities. Every day, there are approximately 58 million daily votes, 2.8 million regular comments, and about 40 million Reddit searches. This translates to about 11 million monthly post submissions. On average, approximately 5 million minutes of videos are viewed daily. The average visit length for the platform is 16 minutes. With Reddit generating this amount of volume, it’s a massive sign that businesses should be paying attention to it.  

How To Use Reddit

Like with all social media sites, the first thing you need to do is sign up for an account on Reddit. As a new user, the site can be quite intimidating and confusing at first. Therefore, you may want to find a few subreddits that you are interested in and add them to your account. Finding subreddits on topics you are interested in will help you get familiar with the website’s navigation. For instance, the homepage shows a variety of trending posts gathered from various subreddits. In the upper left-hand corner, you have the sort button that can help sort posts by whether they are trending, controversial, new, and more.

The search bar helps you find subreddits and posts related to a search term. For instance, a search for ‘Cryptocurrency’ will yield popular posts on cryptocurrency along with relevant subreddits. All subreddit names begin with a lowercase ‘r’ accompanied by a slash and the subreddit’s name. Each subreddit comes with its own rules regarding posting and is hosted by a moderator. Each post has a number, as well as up and down arrows. The arrows are used to either upvote or downvote a post, thereby, either increasing or decreasing its visibility. If you hover your mouse over each post, you’ll see the user’s name and “karma” amount. 

How To Create A Good Brand Presence On Reddit

1. Creating a great brand presence on Reddit depends on how you choose to interact with and market to the entire Reddit community. Below are some ways that you can build a good brand presence on Reddit. They include:

2. Ensuring that your posts have titles with between 60 and 80 characters. This is because posts that are less than 20 characters or over 120 characters perform the poorest.

3. Ensuring that you know what you’re looking for in terms of engagement with the Reddit community. For example, posts that have questions tend to generate more comments, posts without questions generate more upvotes, link posts are the most popular, and videos with external links are the most upvoted on Reddit.

4. Ensuring that your content is timely and tailored for the individuals in the subreddit that you intend to place your post. 

5. Ensuring that you adhere to each subreddit’s reddiquette to avoid getting flagged and banned from the site.

How To Build An Online Community On Reddit

Although Reddit has sometimes been in the headlines for user’s occasional lousy conduct, it has grown into one of the most popular websites. Unlike other social media platforms, Reddit’s success comes from its decentralized nature where any user can create his or her community. This is what makes Reddit such a powerful community-building platform, especially for businesses. Building a Reddit community is easier than you think. Here are a few tips to help you get started: 

- Understand your field. You should have enough expertise and understanding to post and promote quality content. 

- Be original. There are hundreds of subreddit niches on the site. Creating a subreddit similar to another will most likely not get you anywhere. Therefore, it’s essential to come up with a unique niche where you can nourish a dedicated subreddit community. 

- Avoid creating a toxic community. Since Reddit offers a level of anonymity for users, it can harbour certain levels of destructive behaviours within subreddits. While a toxic subreddit community may thrive at first, often it’ll most likely collapse when users start crossing the line.  

- Don’t spam your community. Reddit users are not too kind to products or self-promotion. Spamming Reddit users is one surefire way of getting members to ban you from Reddit. Therefore, keep the promotions to a minimum and genuinely contribute to a topic because you care. 

How To Post On Reddit

There are three ways to make a post on Reddit: text posts, link posts, and image or video posts. To begin a post, look for the ‘Create Post’ option on the right. To post an original thought, start with the ‘Post’ option and then go ahead to fill out the form that pops up. To share a link, start with the “Link” option and fill out the form. Or to embed an image or video, click on the ‘Image & Video’ option and fill out the form. You will also need to add the subreddit where you want your post to appear (unless you are already inside the subreddit). But before you do that, it would be a great idea to check the subreddit’s page for posting guidelines to ensure that you are abiding by them. 

Conclusion

If you’re looking to start on Reddit marketing, the best way is to start sooner rather than later. Beware though, Reddit users don’t take too kindly to direct marketing. However, with the right kind of quirkiness and finesse, you could make all the difference in getting your business in front of engaged Redditors and site visitors. If you aren’t afraid of criticism, then Reddit a great place to start.

Pawel Tomczyk

Pawel has been a marketer for 7 years. He enjoys topics related to technology, Fintech, and renewable energy. In 2016 he started a digital marketing company called Cyberius