How to Use Reddit in Your Social Media and Influencer Marketing Strategy
Founded in 2005, Reddit is a wildly popular social networking site that hosts a massive collection of forums, or threads, where users can share news and media content while engaging in discussion. There are a ton of subreddits focused on almost every topic you can imagine, leading to the site’s popularity. As of 2020, Reddit has been ranked as the 19th most viewed website in both the US and the world, according to Alexa. At its core, Reddit is a social sharing website like Twitter or Instagram and is a great place for people to find online communities based on their interests. For these reasons, Reddit is a fantastic tool for marketers to use in their influencer marketing campaigns and media strategies.
r/InfluencerMarketing
Before getting into the ways you can use Reddit in your social media strategy, it’s important to note one of Reddit’s biggest resources. Since influencer marketing has proved to be a rapidly-growing industry, Reddit took notice in 2015 and created an influencer marketing subreddit for the purpose of helping users learn how to work with influencers to better promote their brand. The subreddit is full of resources, ideas, and tips for all those interested in social media influencing. Through the Reddit Influencer Marketing page, brands, marketers, and influencers can all cross-communicate and create a helpful environment by sharing popular threads and starting discussions on specific topics. Some of the topics geared towards brands include:
- Tips for outreaching and building connections with influencers
- How to run a marketing campaign
- The platforms that are most useful for various campaigns
Upon joining this thread, you’ll gain access to valuable information that can help you stay ahead of the trends and be a leader for influencer marketing campaigns.
How to Use Reddit: Marketing Edition
1. Finding Influencers
The key to using Reddit for your media strategy is to first find influencers that are interested in promoting your brand. It’s imperative to ensure that the creator, or creators, that you choose to reach out to and build a connection with are true embodiments of your brand. Pay special attention to your audience’s wants, needs, and identities – this information will help you find an influencer with values and an image that aligns with your products or services. If this sounds daunting, Reddit can come in handy and make it a much simpler process.
On the Reddit influencer marketing page, brands can post about their upcoming campaigns that they need influencers to promote. Many influencers, including micro-influencers, utilize Reddit to find opportunities and easily reach out to brands. With a smaller community of 4,700 users on the subreddit, influencers are readily accessible, making them easier to find, contact, and communicate with.
2. Locate Niche Communities
Similar to the way audience segmentation works, Reddit can help you find highly social niche communities through their subreddit threads that can be relevant to the audiences, or consumers, to which you’re trying to market. Reddit is a large platform with a higher average daily user time of more than 11 minutes – it’s active and popular, but it’s consistently underutilized in terms of marketing.
On the Reddit homepage, users see content that is tailored to the communities and topics they care about. This way, when marketing your brand, your ad can be the first thing a user sees in the morning when they log onto Reddit. However, it’s crucial to approach niche communities in genuine ways that don’t disrespect the users engaging in passionate discussions. To best market on subreddits, be a genuine participant. In other words, don’t make all of your posts on Reddit solely focused on promoting your products or services. Most communities prefer brands to contribute more than they self-promote, so your strategy should include a plan that includes different forms of unique and original content. Immerse yourself in the comment threads, inside jokes, lingo, content formats, and inner-workings of that subreddit; it shouldn’t be treated the same as all other subreddits. By doing so, you’ll gradually pick up on what kind of content garners the most interest and has the biggest effect.
3. Optimize Your Account
After registering for a Reddit account, it’s beneficial to build up your feed by following all of the subreddits that are relevant to your brand. Get a sense of what kinds of content your target audiences are engaging with and pay special attention to variables like posting time. Traditionally, the content that gains the most attention on Reddit are GIFs, pictures, text-based posts, and news. The more your content is Upvoted by other users, the higher your content will be moved up and seen by more people in the thread.
Another idea for content would be to host an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) where you can encourage Redditors to ask you questions about your brand or products. This type of promotion is best when you have an influencer or interesting person on staff affiliated with your brand who can answer questions quickly and in an engaging way.
It’s also helpful to set up a TrackReddit account to receive alerts. TrackReddit, which has both free and premium features, can send you notifications when a keyword or phrase is used on Reddit. This tool allows you to quickly jump on Reddit when users mention your brand and engage in conversations about topics that align with your brand.
Examples of Successful Marketing on Reddit
While Reddit has an ad platform, the frequent changes to the tool make it difficult for marketers to discover what works the best or how an ad spend on Reddit compares to other advertising platforms. In general, targeting ads by community has seen higher engagement, and many brands have pulled off successful campaigns on Reddit through original content. Here are some of the most popular:
- KFC’s Valentine’s Day Campaign
For Valentine’s Day, KFC ran a drawing, writing, and Photoshop contest that was aimed at Reddit’s most creative communities. The contest gained up to 900 comments and several dozen art submissions. The campaign came out on top after Redditors saw that the marketing team behind the KFC account was consistently joking along with them in the comments and posting a lot of original content about their brand. By taking the time to reply to comments and starting conversations, KFC proved that they can add something valuable to the Reddit community by engaging with their audience on a personal level.
- Audi’s Think Faster
Utilizing Reddit’s streaming feature, Audi posted an AMA thread with a twist. In a series of live streams, various celebrities drove Audi’s newest car on a test track while answering questions from Redditors. This campaign was not only successful because of the involved influencers, but it was also innovative in the way that it re-invented the typical text-based AMA to be unique and interesting to engage with.
- Lemonade Inc.
The insurance app, Lemonade, created a promoted post that was targeted towards fast-food subreddits through the use of video. The video highlights various insurance payments that cost as much as fast food items to show how those payments could help users cover property losses in the future. This is a great example of how Lemonade narrowed down their target audience and found a specific niche/Reddit community that would benefit from their campaign the most.
While Reddit’s structure differs from other social networking sites, it allows marketers to effortlessly tap into a new kind of brand engagement. By connecting with new audiences, brands can directly become a part of the communities that matter to them and build long-lasting, loyal relationships. As mentioned before, Reddit is a social sharing website at its core. With this new avenue of outreach, it can open doors to new possibilities for your brand and inspire you to create and share Reddit-worthy original content.
