Using Reddit and How It Can Help Your Brand Take Content Marketing to the Next Level

This is the fourth part of the series whereby I am turning the wonderful talks into actionable takeaways you can implement in your business. Yesterday’s article was about How to write customer driven copy that converts. This article is looking at Using Reddit and how it can help your brand take content marketing to the next level. This is by Daniel Russell.

Coming up with new content idea’s can be hard especially if you need to be thinking of idea’s constantly and even harder if you work in a team of one and have to do all this yourself. Daniel talks about how using sources like Reddit can help you come up with some great content ideas that work with your audience. This is something we have heard about before but never tried till I heard him speak.

Reddit is currently the largest online forum so it’s an amazing place to find content idea’s, but if your niche has a more specific forum where everyone goes, the same principles can also apply there. Reddit is the 8th most visited site according to Alexa and in January of 2017 got 274 million unique visitors and a lot of return visitors so it’s likely to have a subreddit for your niche. Even what some would class as “boring” niches (even though I don’t like the word boring) there can be very active subreddits for these niches.

One of the key features of Reddit is the Discussion threads, basically, its people commenting on content and then others commenting on those comments.

What this is great for is if you have a content idea, try and find people talking about it on Reddit or find a piece of content on Reddit that you like, and read the comments. Are people interested in it, what don’t they like about it, or they might have ideas for other content which might do well.

Before you start trying to start interacting on the site, you will need an active account. Nothing looks like spam and using for your own advantage than having a brand new account with no history. So get onto Reddit and start interacting.

Now you have an active account let’s get started.

How to use Reddit to find content

Learn to use the search function:

• You can filter by author is you know some who is influential in the sector
• Site – so you can see where a particular site gets mentioned across Reddit. Let’s say you are working on a travel website and wanna see where trivago gets mentioned but more importantly get upvoted a lot.

Sorting

Once you have filtered it down, you can quickly sort to see which ones have the most upvotes, or the ones with the most comments or the newest.

Limiting

As I discussed earlier Reddit gets a lot of traffic and a lot of comments and posts, the limiting. Get popular posts from over a year ago might not relevant now so you can narrow down your results.

You can also limit your search to a particular sub-Reddit – let’s say you’re doing some research on football, without limiting to a subreddit you would get results about American Football, Football (the proper one) etc, so without limiting you could spend a lot of time looking at irrelevant posts.

As someone who does a lot of outreach and content building, sometimes the best content is the controversial content – it gets people talking.

The great thing about Reddit is that you can filter by this, you can see the posts which gets the mosts upvotes and downvotes. This can be a great source for content.

Daniel says his best filter has been:

“Looking at the top content from a particular subreddit over the past month.”

The past month is the freshest content that has past. With the internet and trends, things which were hot 6 weeks ago are now old news and wouldn’t make great content.

Now you know what works – start producing the content

So you know what people like and are discussing about look at the formats which are working.

Among the top posts – is there a standard formula, do they use graphs, do they write lists or is it long form content.

If you want it to work you need to understand what works. If you can make it match what they are used to it will work much better.

The great thing about Reddit is that as well as users that use the site, journalists from small to large sites use it for ideas and if they see something which is popular they are far more likely to pick up on it – after all we all need more links.

Everyone needs links – and Dan gives some brilliant examples of where he has used this tactic get links in even in some boring niches.

Now you have your content which hopefully the users on Reddit like, you need to get it noticed.

Don’t try and vote manipulate, firstly it will look strange to Reddit systems and potential users. You don’t want your account to be suspended and content removed.

Limitations:

The data is skewed. Research shows that Reddit

• is 67% male
• Is 64% 19-29 years old
• 42% have college degrees or more
• Only 18% have high school or less
• 70% is white
• 81% is Liberal / moderate

These are for the whole of data if you’re looking at say women’s makeup subreddit while only 33% of the total audience is female, the majority of the subreddit will be female and target audience.

I wouldn’t say these are reason’s not to use Reddit, just things to bear in mind when looking at surveys etc on the platform.

The key to success

Identify the right subreddits where your audience / potential audience hangs out

Identify what content they like and in what format

Produce some content in the same format which is unique both to your client and Reddit

Get the content posted on Reddit – make it clear where the data has come from with a link.

If a publisher does pick up on the content you want them linking to you and not Reddit, after all, Reddit doesn’t need the links and it’s exactly why you produced this content.

Reddit is so powerful

You just gotta learn how to use it and you can produce amazing content which as well as building brand exposures you get the all important links and the great thing is – you don’t need a team of creatives to come up with idea’s you have Reddit’s 274 million unique active users to help you and better still they help you do the outreach.

Let me know in the comments before if you have had success with Reddit and what the results were.

Please remember these are my takings from the conference and not those of Daniel, while I have used her presentation as inspiration and quoted her a few times the words are my own.

Please check back tomorrow to see How to build a SEO-intent based framework for any business by Katie Cunningham or check out the full series here.

If you are struggling to build links, why not check out our series of articles to help you improve your link building success or get in touch and see if we can help you out.

Andy Halliday

I am the Managing Director of Coreter Media and have been in Digital Marketing since 2009. Initially in-house working for some of the UK’s biggest brands, but now I run my own agency helping small businesses grow.