Social media platform Reddit is making waves in many areas, including marketing, thanks to its recent IPO, which is quite an achievement for a company that has been around for 20 years, which in internet terms is the time when the dinosaurs roamed.
Here's a marketer's guide to Reddit to help you understand the platform and decide if it's the right channel for you.
Added tips on handling reputation management to the guide.
Reputation Management on Reddit
Reddit can have a huge impact on your brand's reputation because it's a platform where people come together and discuss specific topics of interest. There are a lot of people who are passionate about the field in which your brand operates. Of course, their passions can go both ways, for better and for worse, so monitoring the site is essential. As long as your brand focuses on sharing expertise and information, your engagement will be appreciated by users. Company-driven hype won't work there.
The first thing you should do is create a brand profile with your brand name listed. People want to know they're getting their information directly from the source. Second, be sure to follow Reddit's overall rules as well as the specific rules for the subreddit you're posting in. Have a Reddit-specific strategy and be consistent with your posts.
It's important to remember that Reddit does not mediate disputes. Reddit encourages posting correct information to counter misinformation. “The Reddit community is typically very supportive of such responses and will likely vote to make a correction more prominent than the original post,” Reddit's FAQ states.
New Feature: Dynamic Product Ads
Reddit has added Dynamic Product Ads to its suite of tools for marketers, which combines shopping signals, machine learning and an advertiser's product catalog to serve products to the most relevant users who are most likely to purchase.
Features include the ability to instantly create campaigns as ads are auto-populated in real time with the latest images, prices and product images from an advertiser's catalogue, and two new targeting options have also been added.
Retargeting serves ads to users based on products they previously engaged with on an advertiser's site, while prospecting serves ads for the most relevant products based on what users engaged with on Reddit or an advertiser's site. The company says it does this through feed and conversation placements, as well as single image or carousel-format ads, to reach Reddit users in the discovery, consideration, or thought stages of decision-making and provide support throughout the buying journey.
Dynamic Product Ads is currently in public beta and available to all Reddit advertisers globally, with Reddit Ads Manager supporting English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese.
What is Reddit?
Reddit is a social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Users submit content, including links, text posts, images, and videos, which are voted up by other users. Content is organized into user-created boards called “subreddits,” which focus on specific topics. Known for its active community, Reddit is the 11th most visited website in the world and the 6th most visited website in the United States.
There are over 100,000 subreddits. These are moderated by volunteer users, so the quality of posts varies. Many, like r/askscience (25M subscribers) and r/askhistorians (2M subscribers), are widely regarded as forums where experts answer questions. That said, they are also home to some of the worst on the internet. Luckily, subreddits are topic-specific, making them easy for brands to avoid.
Learn more: B2B CEO Social Media Checklist
The most popular features are the Ask Me Anything (AMA) events, featuring celebrities like President Obama and Bill Gates, as well as actors, musicians, astronauts, etc. While these are the biggest draw in terms of numbers, AMAs featuring topic experts are extremely popular within certain subreddits.
As of December 2023, Reddit had over 1 billion posts and over 16 billion comments.
Demographics
- 63.6% of Reddit users are male.
- 44% of US users are between the ages of 18-29.
- 31% are between 30 and 49 years old.
- 50% of Reddit users are from the US
- 64% have an annual household income of $75,000 or more.
Learn more: Reddit is testing new tools to help brands increase engagement
how to use
- Average daily active users (DAU) will be 73 million in Q4 2023.
- In January 2024, Meta's DAU across all apps reached 3.19 billion.
- Pinterest's DAU in January 2024 will be 498 million.
- The average monthly active users (MAU) in February 2024 will grow from 430 million in 2019 to 1.2 billion.
- Facebook's MAU reaches 3 billion in January.
- Instagram hits 2 billion MAU in January.
- TikTok: Estimated MAUs in January: 1.6 billion.
- 22% of the US population uses Reddit (Facebook 68%, YouTube 83%).
- Many Reddit users don’t use other social media, with over 50% not using platforms like Pinterest, Snapchat, or X.
- Reddit's average user revenue (ARPU) in 2023 will be around $0.80 (Facebook's is $9.62)
Reddit Marketing Strategy
The key word in marketing on Reddit is engagement: the more engagement you get, the more responses you'll get. While many businesses run image or video ads and call it a day, moderators of the business-run r/Redditmarketing cite this as a best practice:
Reddit is a quirky site, and each community has its own dos and don'ts (clearly posted at the top of each subreddit) – for example, no ads are allowed on r/advertising.
Overall, you want to have a human brand voice and a little bit of self-poke fun, says Laura Schiele, head of paid acquisition at Jordan Digital Marketing. The more you know about your audience, the better your results will be, which is a big plus for B2B marketers.
“There are some companies that have a specific audience of engineers and have had success with that,” she told MarTech. “If there's a community you want to get noticed by, you can get that community on Reddit.”
She also emphasizes that quality, customized creative is important on Reddit: using or referencing the site's jargon and activity is good, but should be done sparingly.
Your user base appreciates expertise and informed comments, two strengths in B2B marketing. Conducting AMAs in the right communities and answering other people's posts and questions on subreddits can go a long way in building credibility.
This is especially important because many people get product recommendations from other users on Reddit. These can be early signs of good or bad news. For example, the subreddit r/buyitforlife is about the most durable, highest quality consumer goods. Over the years, I've seen early signs of brands rising as they're discovered and falling as their quality declines.
Reputation Management
When it comes to advertising specifics, it's important to know that 75% of Reddit users worldwide access the site via mobile, so make sure you optimize for phones and tablets.
Since Reddit is all about finding the right audience, it’s good to know that there are several third-party analytics apps available: Additionally, the platform has updated its Reddit Ads Manager with tools to help you write ad copy, edit assets, optimize campaign results, manage your budget, and more.
