At Inbound, Reddit’s Senior Growth Marketing Manager, Erica Yoon, was interviewed by HubSpot’s VP of Community-Led Growth, Laurie Aquilante Faiola, to discuss how Reddit has created communities and how a business can take advantage of these easily available communities.
A community can start from just about any topic and evolve from there. Maybe it starts as a pickup sports group and eventually evolves into a full-fledged social sports league, or maybe it’s a group of like-minded individuals tinkering with a business idea and a company forms. Regardless of how communities start, there are opportunities within them to grow your idea and promote your message. Today, one of the best places on the Internet to find a community is Reddit.
Reddit is a social news site that is filled with specific communities called subreddits. If you can think of something, there is more than likely a subreddit devoted to it. Favorite TV show? There’s a subreddit all about it and filled with users or redditors who are there specifically to talk about it. Redditors can create threads and post comments on threads to get involved in the community as well as give users “up” and “down” votes on certain comments to affect their status within the community.
As marketers and advertisers, it’s our job to build an audience. Once we know the audience that we’re trying to target, we need to find the best possible avenues for our message or product. With Reddit being so full of existing communities, there’s a good chance that our target audience may be right in front of us. According to Semrush, Reddit is the 9th most visited website in the world. If you want a highly trafficked site to find users in your audience, Reddit may just be the place to go.
Aside from joining a community, Reddit also has advertising opportunities. There is inventory for both web banners and promoted posts that fit in with the theme of threads with comments from Redditors. What’s incredibly helpful is that these promoted posts can still receive up and down votes from the community, which is an amazing way to get feedback from your ads right from the audience themselves!
So, you’ve found your audience, you’ve explored Reddit, and you’re ready to put up an ad. You’re probably thinking that you should start by targeting specific subreddits to reach exactly who you’re thinking of. Well, you can, but it’s not ideal. With Reddit, a Redditor might belong to any number of wildly different sub-reddit communities, so it’s better to target based on interests that your audience would fit into, according to Yoon. This way you may discover other communities that you hadn’t thought of initially, ready to take in your business.
Reddit is not generally the first thing thought of when a marketer is looking for a platform for their content, but with an increasingly disconnected physical world, online communities are growing. Start trying to find your audience with Reddit and its millions of subreddits. Work with Wedu and promote your brand on Reddit today.