I don’t need to tell you how big an impact social media can have on your marketing. However, with Facebook’s increasing limits on the organic reach, and the sheer amount of marketing communications jostling for traction on Twitter, marketers need to start branching out and learning how to use other platforms if they are to stay relevant and effective.
Reddit is a prime example of the kind of platform that marketers need to start utilizing. Despite being one of the biggest social sharing sites in the world with 56 billion page views last year alone, Reddit is virtually untouched by online marketers, in part thanks to its reputation of hostility towards us!
However, thanks to its structure and user behaviour, Reddit essentially segments its billions of users into niche interest groups. This makes it an incredible resource for marketers, as it allows them to plug themselves into an active and relevant audience. This means that, if used properly, Reddit can bring you huge numbers of highly targeted traffic, and help you build an engaged audience of internet influencers.
Reddit 101
At its core, Reddit is a social sharing content site. It is comprised of hundreds of thousands of subreddits, which are communities dedicated to one niche or topic. Subreddits range from the tiny and highly specific, like /r/floorgasm (a community which talks about nice flooring) to places like /r/jokes which has close to 2 billion users.
Users create or share content on their chosen subreddits, where it is then voted upon by the community. The more upvotes a post gets, the more exposure it will receive. The more exposure it receives, then the more votes it will continue to get, which means that really cool posts can end up snowballing. If a piece of content is popular enough, it will get promoted to the front page, which can drive website-crashing amounts of traffic.
On the other hand, boring content will get downvoted by the community and get removed.
In essence, the site is self-moderated. Anyone can sign up for a Reddit account, and you don’t even need an email address to sign up. Once you’ve got an account you can start building “karma” by sharing and commenting on content. Good karma shows the community that you are legitimate.
Once you have signed up to Reddit, you can get involved by posting links, pictures and text posts to your chosen subreddits.
Driving Targeted Traffic
While getting your content onto the front page of Reddit can drive literally millions of pageviews, unless you’re working on brand awareness or promoting something everyone enjoys, this will likely be wasted traffic.
As digital marketers we should be after targeted traffic which can really make a difference to our business, either through sales or engagement. This is why identifying relevant subreddits is so crucial for Reddit marketing, as it allows you to reach your exact target demographic; those Redditors who are actually interested in what you’re doing.
For example, let’s say that your company sells something very niche like self-taught online Chinese lessons. Instead of trying to worm your way onto the front page and driving huge amounts of indiscriminate traffic with more generic content, you could focus on subreddits like /r/ChineseLanguage, /r/Team_Mandarin and /r/languagelearning. Sure, perhaps these subreddits don’t have the colossal reach of huge subreddits like /r/funny or /r/pics, but it can still put your content infront of around 60,000 active interested users!
By sharing your most interesting and compelling content on these sort of subreddits, you will be driving traffic from your prime target customers, which will massively increase the chances of that traffic converting!
By using Reddit’s pre-existing user segmentation to your advantage, you don’t need to adapt your content to the platform, but instead find pockets of users who are already interested in what you have to say! This leads us on to…
Offering Genuine Value
According to this infographic, 88% of Redditors are educated to bachelor degree standard, or higher.
As well as this, a majority of users work in creative, web based industries. This means that they are very aware of how digital marketing works and are very sceptical towards attempts by marketers to game or spam the system.
As a result, Reddit is seen by many web marketers as being extremely hostile towards them. There are popular subreddits like /r/HailCorporate which are dedicated solely to mocking marketing attempts on the platform.
However, if used transparently and earnestly, Reddit can massively benefit you and your clients. If your content offers real value or entertainment on a relevant subreddit, it will perform well and you will start to build a community around you and your brand.
Reddit can’t be used as a place to promote generic marketing communications or try a hard sell – instead, it’s a place where you can give fantastic content marketing the boost it deserves!
The most important thing, as ever, is value and entertainment. For example, this joint campaign by Amazon and Nissan was massively successful, despite being an obvious marketing ploy. It just goes to show that Redditors can and will be receptive to marketing – as long as it is clever and offers the Reddit community something good.
Similarly, if your company is doing something newsworthy or interesting, Reddit can be a great place to spread that, as this heartwarming story from CostCo or interesting factoid from YKK shows.
Look out for Part Two tomorrow!
By Scott Masson.