What is Reddit?
Reddit is a social news and content rating site which receives an incredible 542 million monthly views and is the 6th most visited website in the world (according to alexa.com). One of the Silicon Valley Unicorns, Reddit has a valuation of $1.8 billion and boasts an array of notable investors including Marc Andreessen (founder of Netscape), Peter Thiel (first investor of Facebook) and oh, of course, Snoop Dogg!
Founded by college roommates Steve Huffman (CEO) and Alexis Ohanian, Reddit has been proclaimed as the internets “front page” and boast 70+ million content submissions from science, to video games, to fitness business, to books, well … to just about anything you can think of!
How Reddit Works?
Reddit is a very simple concept where it’s users (Redditors) submit content, which could be anything from an image to a blog post and the community of Reddit vote it up or down. The more upvotes, the higher the content appears. Posts that get a lot of upvotes move to the “Hot” page. Reddit is further broken down into “subreddits” which are subsidiary categories and threads within the site.
Ways in which Reddit can be used in your content marketing strategy?
Firstly, why use Reddit in your content marketing strategy?
- So 500+ million monthly views to a content platform is kind of a big deal – so as a content marketer Reddit needs to be taken seriously given it is the most influential social news aggregator on the planet.
- It’s not Google or Facebook – As Google and Facebook continue to grow their advertising revenues, as a marketer, competition goes up and so does cost. As businesses look to control acquisition costs, diversification of platforms can play a big part.
How to use Reddit in your content marketing strategy?
Content marketers typically will use Reddit for one of two purposes. One is to direct traffic to your own site, and the other is to get eyeballs on your content within the hosted Reddit site. Baring this in mind there are two types of posts on Reddit, links that direct users to another site (i.e. yours) and the other is a text post on Reddit itself.
Then comes the actual content you post. Firstly, you need to know your audience. Luckily with the use of Subreddits, you can pretty quickly identify a super targeted audience or demographic. So if your prospective audience is interested in video games, dating, or playing video games during dates, you will pretty quickly find a strong audience.
Some considerations about your audience is that almost two-thirds of the Reddit users are male and over half the audience is between the ages of 18 and 29. If that’s not your target audience, don’t let that put you off. Due to the niche topics and vast quantities of users, even if your target audience is not that of the average you will still be amazed at the number of users that do fit your niche.
The number of submissions that Reddit receives daily is massive. Whilst this is a testament to its value proposition this can make your content hard to stand out from the crowd. Because of this, like any good content marketer will know, you need to keep your content unique, relevant and engaging.
And if you’d rather beat off the competition by flexing your financial muscles you can, of course, ensure your posts prominence with the use of Reddit advertising.
What to watch out for?
It is very easy to get banned on Reddit, and they hold no prisoners when there is suspected spam.
Some tips to avoid getting banned
- Ensure you read and follow the Redditquette https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette
- Don’t post too many links (especially to your own site)
- Don’t create fake accounts to manipulate your posts performance
- Keep your comments on posts on topic and relevant
- Don’t ask for upvotes.
Lastly, its important like with many things, that without the investment of time and effort you are not going to get the rewards you are looking for and there are no easy options here. Unless you are going to become a legitimate member of the Reddit community you should really think twice about using Reddit as part of your content strategy. But if you are prepared to do the graft, the potential results are there for the taking.
Authored By:
James Craigmillar writes for Inspiring Interns, which specializes in finding candidates their perfect graduate jobs. To browse our internships London listings, visit our website.
