5 ways to make marketing on Reddit work

While thinking about social networks, it’s unlikely that Reddit will come to your mind first.  Even though it’s a fast-growing platform, brands seem to be not very interested in promoting their services and products on Reddit. For some of them, it can be a crucial omission. 

Let's start with some interesting facts about Reddit that could be useful for marketers. 

Reddit's users are united around different communities. 

Users on this platform join different communities based on their interests: they can be beer or cat lovers, football fans, or socially active citizens interested in politics. And all of them united at one place – in the community on Reddit. 

Recently, we shared an article about tribal marketing. This conception is based on user segmentation in accordance with their beliefs, affinities, and interests instead of clustering by demographics. Reddit is a perfect space for searching and engaging this type of audience. 

For instance, Reddit is the most popular network for the tech community. 

It means that this social media platform is not only for brands that represent the IT industry but also for companies that want to launch campaigns that include, for instance, NFTs or cryptocurrencies. 

Reddit attracts users that don't use other social networks. 

It’s not a secret that the audience of such networks as Facebook goes down in developed countries. Reddit is one of the places for these users to migrate. Official statistics provided by the platform prove that Reddit managed to attract users that don’t have active accounts on other social networks. 

Reddit can help boost a personal brand.

10 years ago, Barack Obama, the president of the USA, surprised the whole world by creating an account on Reddit and starting the "Ask me Anything" session. Since on Reddit, users bring a post to the top by voting for or against it, Barack Obama soared quickly. The same happened to Elon Musk when his company SpaceX tried to draw attention to the launch of its BFR rocket by starting an AMA session. 

Now AMA sessions can be used successfully to attract more attention to public figures. One of the most popular AMA sessions of the last year was held by Jon Stewart, the host of Apple TV. 

Reddit's users can damage your brand reputation. 

When it comes to negative feedback, nothing can compare with Twitter. This social network united all lovers of controversial topic discussions and online scandals. YouScan's research showed that Twitter has the lowest Net Sentiment Rate (the ratio between positive and negative mentions) compared to other social networks. But the main difference between Twitter and Reddit is that on Reddit, users can vote for the most engaging topic and bring it to the top. It helps users spread negative news really fast. 

That's why it's crucial to track brand mentions on Reddit and respond immediately. 

Let's look at Starbucks as an example. The brand seems to be one of the most Instagrammable. We collected all social media mentions of the brand to check the top popular sources. Reddit is in top-5, and it has more relevant mentions than Instagram. Moreover, negative discussions about Starbucks had already caused spikes on Reddit. 

Reddit can bring traffic to your website. 

In the recent YouScan research about social media trends that we mentioned previously, we found out that only 1.5% of social media users tend to post links online. But this rule doesn't apply to Reddit. On this social media network, links are one of the main types of content. That's why Reddit's digital marketing capabilities can also be helpful for brands. 

With YouScan, a social media monitoring tool, it's very convenient to analyze what links and hosts appeared the most often in the same posts with brand mentions. For instance, last month, some users mentioned Tesco and posted a link with an article on Daily Mail. It says that the supermarket chain apologized for putting security tags on cosmetics for dark skin. 

Brand cases

Xbox

One of the most successful communities on Reddit has Xbox – it has almost 400k subscribers. And what is even more interesting, it was created by users, not by brand. From time to time, the gaming company warms up its interest in inviting developers to answer Redditors' questions. Also, Xbox rewards the most active users and encourages them to post pictures of the games console. 

Audi 

Almost every big car brand has its Reddit community. This goes for Audi, BMW, Toyota, etc. One of the most exciting cases was created by Audi. It was called "The world's fastest AMA." The brand invited celebrities for a test tract of the newest cars, and while racing, they were answering Redditor's questions. 

Reddit also had lots of not branded car communities where users discuss what car they should buy, watch crush tests, share lifehacks, etc. Brands representatives can join it and participate in discussions and providing official responses to users requests. 

Figma

We used to see many beautiful designs on Instagram and especially on Pinterest, but creating images is not only about inspiration. Software users can have many questions related to their ideas' technical implementation. For this purpose, Figma has its Reddit community, where the brand promotes its add-ons, stays aware of all problems that users face, and helps them find solutions in their cases. 

Do you want to track your brand mentions and know what Redditors think about your brand? Request YouScan's free demo and learn how social media listening can bring value to your company.