Your Guide To Reddit Marketing 101

What is Reddit?

Reddit is a largely untapped gold mine for internet marketers, but it is fiercely guarded by the Reddit community. Reddit is not a standard social media site; it is the internet’s largest collection of forums that focus on the spread of information and entertainment. The self-proclaimed front page of the internet had 1.6 billion unique visitors in March of 2019. Reddit is broken up into millions of different “subreddits” each of which is dedicated to something different and each subreddit is denoted by the requisite “r/“ in front of the name of the community. For example, a widely popular subreddit is “r/aww” which focuses on cute pictures of animals. Reddit users, “Redditors”, are usually anonymous, it is not common practice to create an account with your first and last name with a picture of oneself for a profile picture like on Facebook, users can subscribe and post to these individual communities as long as they abide by the rules. Each community writes its own rules, if the rules are broken then posts or accounts can be banned. Unlike on Facebook or other social media sites, Reddit uses Karma points as an its version of liking or disliking. Redditors can upvote or downvote posts, posts that receive high amounts of upvotes make it to the front page and receive more attention, whereas posts that receive too much downvotes receive negative attention and will affect the poster’s credibility. Redditors across subreddits tend to be strongly against self-promotion interjected into their feeds, which makes it a minefield for advertisers. It is very important to Reddit users across the platform that their custom-tailored feed is not interrupted by a company just trying to get a sale.

Why Should Businesses Use Reddit?

Reddit is widely misunderstood and can be a difficult platform for advertisers who don’t understand the rules. However, its tricky nature has also made it a reliable spot for inexpensive advertising space compared to Facebook and Twitter. Advertisers disregard Reddit as an avenue for promotion, but Reddit possesses a lot of potential. The nature of Reddit funnels users into their spheres of interest, which gives businesses the ability to target very specific audiences. Businesses should use these specific communities to their advantage, they can post useful content that expands the conversations on subreddits, which admittedly requires more time and creativity that regular ads, but that is the content that the Reddit audience is more receptive to. Companies should consider using Reddit to market themselves because it can expand their reach, separate themselves from the rest of the market, and it has effective options for organic posts and paid advertisements.

Using Reddit for Organic Posts

Reddit’s explicit policies against excessive promotion, means that advertisers must be creative when putting out organic posts. Many companies have chosen to use Reddit not for outright promotion, rather they focus on interacting with the public and their customer base. Large enough companies could find it useful to create their own subreddit, this would give people an easy platform for giving feedback or getting important updates about the company. Smaller companies could consider posting relevant content to subreddits that center on their area of expertise. A common type of thread allowed on some subreddits are Ask Me Anything (AMA) posts. AMAs can be used by a company to answer questions levied by the public and they make the company seem very approachable. Another free option is on the r/deals subreddit, unlike most of Reddit, this community welcomes promotion in the forms of coupons and discounts. Sometimes a company can create promotional posts, it just needs to be allowed under the subreddit guidelines. For example, r/Fitness accepts weekly promotional posts on their “Self-Promotion Saturdays”, this is a way that members of this subreddit can get connected to equipment brands, nutrition companies, or even personal trainers.

Using Reddit for Advertising

Since Reddit is not as commonly used as other platforms for digital marketing, advertisers can run adds for relatively low cost. Reddit ads are priced at a flat rate of $0.75 CPM. Since ads are priced by thousands of impressions it is important to make these impressions count, some companies spend exuberant amounts of money advertising on massive subreddits like r/funny, but they experience low conversion rates because of the lack of focus. Reddit ads can be targeted based on user location or general interests, or they can also be put on specific subreddits. Prices are the same regardless of subreddits targeted, but there is a minimum of $5 for any sponsored individual link. Ads are most commonly made as photos or links; the ads appear within the feed like regular posts or on the side of the page in a more permanent fashion. Ads in the feed are more effective when they are concise, honest, and seem written by an actual person. A couple of drawbacks of ads on Reddit is that they are not published nearly as fast as some other sites because all Reddit ads must be reviewed, and the process can take upwards of 2 days. In addition, certain subreddits are not large enough to run ads. The Reddit algorithm requires that a page get at least 73 visits a day, which equates to 6,600 page views in 3 months in order to be eligible to run ads, which means there may be a super specific subreddit that is perfect for your ads that you cannot advertise on.

Reddit is a platform used predominantly by young adults between the ages of 18 and 24, they use Reddit as a place for news, advice, and entertainment. Subreddits are dedicated to over a million different topics ranging from “r/legaladvice” which is for users seeking advice on their legal problems, to “r/superbowl” which is a subreddit dedicated to pictures of superb owls. This community comes to Reddit because they are seeking a different experience from Facebook or Twitter, and they are very protective of this community. There is opportunities to use Reddit to promote your business, it just requires patience, practice, and thinking differently from the normal social media marketing strategies.