Why You Should Be Posting Content on Reddit
Written by Kunal Sharma
Want to know what social media platform is the toughest to market your product on? It’s not Facebook, Instagram, or even LinkedIn. It’s Reddit! But what is about posting content on Reddit that makes it so hard to market your product? Reddit calls itself the “front page of the Internet,” and for good reason. As of 2019, Reddit is the sixth most popular website in the United States, and eighteenth most popular in the world, with nearly 1.7 billion visits to the website in July of this year.
How content on Reddit works
How is Reddit so popular? To start off, the social platform is comprised of over 100,000 communities/forums called “subreddits.” These subreddits discuss everything from fashion to sports to mental health, and users talk about anything related to the point of the subreddit.
For example, r/nba is a community that discusses everything that is related to the National Basketball League. Likewise, r/malementalhealth is a community dedicated to supporting men who are dealing with mental health issues. This is just to show that no matter what your niche is, your potential content on Reddit has a home and an audience that may be willing to listen.
Now there are subreddits that may be a bit too specific for your target audience, like r/digitalmarketing. While this specific subreddit has around 33,000 subscribers, there are less than 20 people who are active on the subreddit at any given time. Being active there isn’t going to help get your name out.
On the other hand, subreddits like r/SEO, r/marketing, and r/business would be great places for you to be active on. Not only is there a huge subscriber-base, but there are lots of people active at all times, which is great when you want to start a discussion or create a popular post.
Now you might be thinking, “all I need to do is find a subreddit related to my product and advertise there! It’s that simple!” Well I’m here to tell you that it’s much harder than you think. Here are all the things you need to do to market your product effectively on Reddit.
Be an active member of the community
Read that title. Now read it again, and again, and again. If you want to succeed as a marketer on Reddit, don’t act like a marketer. Yes, you read that right. Your average Redditor absolutely hates marketers who spam, and they’re a lot smarter than the average Facebook or Instagram user. The moment your profile feels like some sort of marketing stunt, everyone will downvote your content, and your message will never be seen.
EA holds the world record for the most downvoted comment in history
Or you’ll become universally hated, like EA somehow managed to do in the message above. When members of r/gaming did not like EA’s reasoning for making users pay to play as Darth Vader in the new Star Wars Battlefront game, EA’s comment quickly became the most downvoted comment in Reddit history, with nearly 700,000 downvotes. To put that into perspective, the next most downvoted comment was less than 100,000, and that person was literally asking for downvotes.
If you want to succeed at gaining the trust of members of a subreddit, you need to be active within the community. That means commenting and submitting posts that add value and generate discussions in the community way before you even think about starting to promote your product.
Once you’ve become an active member of the community, you can start marketing your product. But again, don’t spam it everywhere! Remember that your content should be similar enough to the normal content posted or provide value to Redditors of the subreddit you’re posting in.