If you haven’t already heard of Reddit, then you are sleeping on one of the best uncapitalized forums on the internet. Reddit is a social media, social news aggregation, web content rating and discussion website, with a passionate community of 234 million users. A link to your business or product can go viral instantly on Reddit, and bring you an enormous amount of visitors. This has happened to many small businesses, so it may be time for you to investigate further into what Reddit can do for your company or product. Here a few things you need to know about the website before you dive in:
SUBREDDITS
Reddit is subdivided into category pages, called subreddits. There are subreddits for everything that you could think of; seriously, there are over 853,000 subreddits, and a good portion of them have active communities. If you are attempting to gain customers or viewers for your product or business, figuring out your audience then subscribing and posting to those subreddits where your audience will be is the best way to go.
KARMA
Or as users call it, “that sweet, sweet, karma.” Karma is an artificial point system that is awarded to posts and comments based on the number of “upvotes” it receives. The more upvotes and karma your post or comment has, the more likely it is to be seen. In layman’s terms, “the cream rises to the top”. Comment karma and post karma are separate, and you’ll want to have high numbers in both sections for users to take you seriously, and to respect your posts without assuming you are automatically trying to sell them something.
SELF-PROMOTION
Following up on “trying to sell them something”, blatant self-promotion is seriously frowned upon on Reddit. There are a set of guidelines on this very subject from Reddit’s own team, but the best way to figure out whether your post is too self-promoting is by getting a feel for the subreddit you are trying to post in. Some general guidelines are not to spam links of your own brand and not to blindly upvote your own content. Don’t represent a brand or act as a brand, act as a normal user who occasionally likes to share information about their brand or product when applicable.
BANNING (or shadow-banning)
Each subreddit is ruled over by a set of moderators; these are real people who establish the rules of the subreddit and enforce them. What the moderators say usually goes, so it’s important to read up on each individual subreddit’s rules, which can usually be found in the information bar on the right side of the page. If the moderators find that you are consistently breaking their rules, or honestly if they just decide they don’t like you, they can ban you from posting in the subreddit altogether. I think it goes without saying, but being banned is NOT a good look for your image or brand.
At the end of the day, it’s easy to follow one simple rule for sharing your brand on Reddit: always provide value. Think before you post: “Is this interesting? Is what I’m posting relevant to the conversation?” If you still feel like you don’t have a handle on how to best represent your brand on this platform, check out these 10 Marketing Campaigns From Big Brands That Won Over Reddit. Or give us a call at 843-718-2988!
