Reddit is a social news and discussion website where users - Redditors, can submit and vote on content, organized into subreddits based on topics, interests and different specific niches.
Users can engage in discussions, comment on posts, and vote content up or down - based on that the content either appears on the front page of the subreddit or disappears into oblivion.
Reddit is a popular platform for sharing news and information, as well as for entertainment.
Reddit is made out of subreddits which are basically smaller communities within the bigger platform. So if your main interest is entrepreneurship, the subreddits for you to browse would be r/Entrepreneur/ or r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/.Â
If you're looking for new podcasters to use your product, your favorite subreddit will probably be r/podcasting.Â
The magic of Reddit is that there's an existing subreddit for basically anything. Yes, even the random thing that you just thought of.Â
To create a Reddit account, go to the Reddit website and click "Sign Up." Enter your email, username, password, and interests. Then just solve the captcha and click "Sign Up."
If you're struggling to come up with a username, you can always use our Reddit username generator to give you some good ideas and inspiration.
🧠Pro Tip: Don't create a brand account on Reddit, it's not very popular over there. Either use your real name (not very common) or just a random nickname and blend in as another Redditor.
Reddit sits somewhere between the likes of Twitter and SEO. On Twitter, you can post every day and maybe even go viral and it will have an immediate impact. However, the content you post is usually gone from the feeds of everyone in the next few hours or the next day.
On the other hand, SEO is a long-term strategy. Writing a good landing page or blog posts will not have an instant impact but once you start ranking, it can have a great value and bring you leads.
Reddit sits somewhere in-between which can make it very powerful. Publishing the right post or writing the right comment can bring you 1-10 leads immediately but the content will also sit there forever. And people can find it back when they're searching for a solution to their problem. It's still super underrated.
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As Rob Walling said, you have to do a lot of things in the early stage which might not scale so well but it's necessary to get your first customers. And that's where we see the potential of Reddit for marketing.
👉 This article is mostly directed at early-stage founders, indie hackers and bootstrappers to help them get those first 10 or 100 customers.
But even if you're an established brand, you can still find value here. Reddit is also amazing for social listening, brand monitoring, driving word of mouth or even boosting your SEO juice.
As stated earlier in the article, there's a specific subreddit basically for every type of niche and audience. If you're building a new amazing tool for podcasters, r/podcasting should be the subreddit where you hang out the most.
You can also use this similar subreddits tool to find more.
The hardest part of marketing on Reddit was always trying to find relevant conversations. If you're trying to acquire more customers, research your market, or even just see the mentions of your brand, you need to find the right threads and discussions.
We realize the power of Reddit but this was a big problem so we decided to build Surfkey - to never miss a relevant Reddit conversation again.
There's always a grey area between blending in, providing value and actually plugging your solution. And that grey area is slightly different for each subreddit depending on their rules and the leniency of the mods.
It's not rocket science though - as long a you always try to provide value first, give actual advice and be friendly, you should be able to get away with plugging your solution in the end. But only if it makes sense in the given context.
Shoehorning your link everywhere will not go down very well.
Make sure to always check the rules of each subreddit before trying to plug your solution there - the rules are usually quite similar to each other but you don't want to miss anything and get shadowbanned (more about that later).
For comments, it's usually pretty straightforward but creating posts can be tricky. Some subreddits will let you self-promote if you contact the mods via modmail beforehand. We sometimes do that regardless just to help build a more friendly relationship with the mods.
Shadowban basically means you were banned without getting notified. You can still browse the given subreddit and even post content but nobody can see it. It usually happens when you break the rules too many times even after warnings from moderators.
Check out this article to find out if you're shadowbanned on Reddit.
Reddit is an amazing place to find new and highly qualified leads, all you need to do is find the right threads and conversations, provide value and plug your product if it makes sense.
We wrote about this in more detail in this article on How to find users on Reddit, check it out.
When it comes to building bigger brand awareness and driving word of mouth, Reddit is still extremely underrated. By always jumping into relevant conversations in relevant subreddits, you can super easily raise the awareness of your brand and product and it's only going to add up over time.
Read about this in more detail in this blog post on How to build brand awareness through Reddit.
Reddit is a great place to share your existing content and boost your reach but there are a few caveats. Just sharing a link to your YouTube channel or blog post will most likely not perform too well so you have to repurpose the content for Reddit specifically.
Pro Tip: Check out the most upvoted posts in the last month on the specific subreddit and repurpose your content to fit that
Quora is known for this benefit but people also underestimate Reddit for this purpose. Just by backlinking your landing page or blog post in a post or comment you can boost your SEO significantly and get more traffic = leads.
We wrote more about this in this article on How to use Reddit to drive traffic, give it a read.
Reddit is full of authentic conversations of people discussing their problems and other Redditors providing solutions. It's also full of people praising or complaining about existing solutions. You want to see it and be there when people do this about yours. And you can do the same for your competitors.
Check out this list of the best social listening tools.
Reddit is amazing for market research and validating your product idea as there are always authentic discussions in your problem space and Redditors looking for a solutions to their problems. Once you find relevant conversations it's a great way to validate your product idea too.
Check out more about this in our article about Reddit market research.
We had a lot of luck in the past with launching our projects on Reddit - granted you find the right subreddits. We recommend a few general subreddits such as r/sideproject, r/saas or r/startup and then always at least one specific subreddit in your niche.
Check out this article on How to launch a product on Reddit to get some tips.
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Advertising on Reddit doesn't have the best reputation as the ads there usually don't go down very well. It even resulted in most ads having comments disabled by default.
There are a few exceptions but it requires knowing your target audience very well and picking the right subreddits and message. And even then it might require a lot of testing, optimization, and tinkering.
We recommend keeping it super transparent and even enabling comments, Redditors appreciate it even though you might get some negative ones.
We recently experimented with Reddit ads for Surfkey - we repurposed our semi-viral video from Twitter of celebrating a new user and turned it into an ad. It generally went down well with the community but the stats are not that impressive.
We got about 15k impressions and 93 clicks - that's about 0.6% CTR. All that cost us about 28 dollars. It's not too bad compared to Google or YouTube ads and there's definitely some potential.
Check out this article on How to advertise on Reddit to learn more.
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With Surfkey, one of the most common objections is that it's hard to measure the impact and success of being active and using Reddit for marketing. And that's fair.
There are a few ways to do that.
Seeing upvotes and positive responses to your comments will always be a good way to measure how much your content resonates. Most of the time, people will thank you if you provide value or if your solution worked to solve their problem.
Google Analytics will also show you the results of your efforts - web traffic will show directly in the Reddit category while people clicking your link on mobile through the Reddit app will show as Direct traffic. If that is suddenly going up, it's a good sign.
Tracking the incoming traffic and impact from Reddit via UTM link is also possible but it's not very recommended. If someone on Reddit notices this, it's obvious that your only intention was self-promotion and you might get banned.
After some time you will see more and more Redditors sharing your solution too and that's when you know you're making impact and doing a good job.
In conclusion, Reddit is amazing for early-stage growth, market/competition research, social listening or even boosting your SEO juice. You just need to find the right subreddits and relevant conversations and always provide value first before plugging your solution. Do that and you don't have to worry about strict rules or the community disliking you.
Try Surfkey to never miss a relevant Reddit conversation again.
Type in topic of interest, your competitors, your brand to set a new keyword watchdog
Whenever your KWs are mentioned in posts, comments, usernames or URLs. btw you can scope subreddits as well 😌
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