MozCon 2017: What We Learned From Reddit & How It Can Help Your Brand Take Content Marketing to the Next Level

The following post is part of WTWH Media Marketing Lab’s ongoing blog series from MozCon 2017. You can find the full presentation here. 

Daniel Russell is the Director at Go Fish Digital. He gave a great talk about the power of Reddit. We all know coming up with new content ideas on a regular basis can be very difficult. It can be even harder to take those ideas and transform them into a successful campaign.

It can be even harder to get your team to buy in if those ideas have never been proven in the past. Luckily, there are online forums where people come together to post different kinds of content. Reddit is the biggest forum on the internet.

Reddit is a really big deal. It’s the eighth most popular website according to its Alexa ranking. It even saw 274 million unique visitors in January 2017. Reddit’s key features are what make it so attractive and keep people coming back.

Key Features

Subreddits: These are forums dedicated to a specific topic. There are subreddits on movies, food, old people using Facebook (see below for laughs), shower thoughts and just about anything else you could think of. As marketers, we’re always trying to gather data for our target market and on Reddit people are self-segregating themselves into different interest groups.

Discussion Threads: These allow people to comment on content and then they’re able to comment on other people’s comments.

Upvoting and Downvoting: If users like something, they upvote it. If they don’t like it, they down vote it. There’s validation built into the content automatically.

Rankings: Over time, the top content automatically rises to the top and the downvoted content gets pushed to the bottom.

Front Page: The front page is a combination of all of the top content from the most popular subreddits.

Rules of Reddit: No spam, no vote manipulation.

Subreddit Rules

• A post must be a data visualization
• Directly link to the original source of the article of the visualization
• [OC] posts must state the data source and tools used in a comment. Only tag a post as [OC] if you made it yourself.
• Requests and questions must include a visualization
• No infographics or other unautomated diagrams
• Compilations are not allowed
• Post titles must describe the data plainly without using sensationalized headlines. Clickbait posts will be removed
• Posts regarding America politics or contentious topics in America media are only permissible on Thursdays (ET).

How do you use Reddit to find content?

Become an active user of Reddit. You need to use it enough to start to understand the environment and culture around the Reddit community. There’s a search bar that allows you to drill down by using search parameters. You can search by author, website, top content, newest content, most discussion, time restrictions, subreddits and most controversial (most upvotes and downvotes). The most valuable filter combination is filtering by the top content of a particular subreddit over the past month.

Case Study #1: Popular Subreddits

Russell’s client was a software provider that needed backlinks and social shares. They found a subreddit named “Data is beautiful.” They began posting their client’s content into this subreddit. They received 600+ backlinks and 7,000+ social shares.

Case Study #2: Top Content

Russell’s client was a limousine and shuttle company and they desperately needed backlinks. Russell’s team found that a lot of people were talking about presidential limos on Reddit. They created a morphing GIF of presidential limos over the years and as a result, they gained 90+ links from websites with high domain authority and many social shares.

Case Study #3: Trending Items

Russell’s client was a jeweler that needed backlinks and brand exposure. His team found that there was a hydraulic press channel that was getting a lot of people’s attention with their videos that would crush objects. Russell’s team decided to send the hydraulic press channel a big diamond and have him smash it in a video that included a link to the jeweler’s website. As a result, the video was seen more than 10 million times, received a lot of coverage and more than 20 links.

As you can see, Reddit is very powerful. However, it does have some limitations to keep in mind. The Reddit data is a bit skewed.

• 67% of Reddit users are male, 33 % of users are female
• 64% of users are between the ages of 19-29
• 42% of users a college degree or greater
• 18% of users have a high school diploma or less
• 70% of users are white/non-hispanic
• 81% of users are liberal/moderate, 19% conservative

Recap

• Become an active user
• Master the search function
• Model and riff off the top content
• Remember Reddit’s limits

Are you currently using Reddit in your marketing efforts? Are you willing to test it in the future? Keep the conversation going by commenting below or tweeting @WTWH_Aly.