With 2.4 million active users and 81 million unique visitors a month, Reddit is one of the world’s most visited social media websites, making the platform valuable to marketers, if used correctly.
Reddit’s content is completely created and moderated by its users– Reddit users submit links to interesting and engaging content, and other users either “upvote” or “downvote” the link depending on if it’s relevant, interesting, and engaging or not.
By being run completely by its users and eliminating any bad content, Reddit encourages the spread of all kinds of different content and fostering intelligent discussion on said content by its users.
Despite this, people often overlook Reddit as a legitimate social media platform due to its simple design and interface. However, due to its high traffic and self-created niche communities, Reddit is one of the most valuable tools to marketers today.
When first logging on to Reddit, a first-time user would probably be incredibly overwhelmed by the front page. The front page of Reddit accumulates all the top posts from the subreddits you are subscribed to. Subreddits are smaller communities that are catered for almost every interest imaginable. From r/cats to r/iphone, there’s literally a subreddit for anything and everything.
Because of this self-segmentation, it’s easy to locate your target audience. For example, we chose to target architects and designers when trying to promote custom furniture design company, d-Tank. We then chose to post our content in r/architecture, r/interiordesign, and r/design. By finding subreddits relevant to your target audience and the content you are trying to promote, you have a better chance of engagement with users.
It’s not enough to just post in a relevant subreddit and hope for the best. By commenting and responding to users who have commented on your content, you can build a more personal relationship with future users of your product. This gives them more incentive to go out and buy your product, rather than just brush it off as something they just “saw on Reddit”. Users respond well to posts by “OP,” or the Original Poster.
A perfect example of this is Reddit user shapirog, who owns the company Penguin Hats. Penguin Hats are exactly what you think they are: fluffy trapper-style hats with a plush penguin fixated to the top. Not exactly the easiest thing to promote. So, how did shapirog do it? First, he posted in r/freebies, a subreddit dedicated to offers for free giveaways from companies. He started by trying spread the word about his new company by offering free Penguin Hats stickers.
The stickers became so popular among the r/freebies community that shapirog actually ran out of stickers! In addition, people who received Penguin Hats stickers could post a picture of themselves with their sticker and have a chance to win an actual Penguin Hat. Due to the success and response to his sticker campaign on r/freebies (he actually did it 3 times), shapirog was able to start PenguinHats as a company and continued small offers for the actual hats on r/freebies to keep users buying his product.
Although there are shining stars such as shapirog, not everything on Reddit sits as well as PenguinHats did. Because all of its content is run by its users, your post could easily be downvoted (and thus off the radar) for not being engaging or interesting enough. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though—it can give insight into whether your product is eye-catching or appealing enough. Even if your post gets downvoted, people may comment on it and give you some valuable information on how your it could be improved.
