430 million average monthly users. 50,000 words posted a minute. 2.5 billion upvotes each month. 1.2 billion comments per year.
Reddit is huge, so we made a huge guide to match.
What is Reddit, and how does it work?
Reddit is a community-determined aggregator of content.
It’s made up of subreddits, which are full of posts by Reddit’s users. Let’s break down how it works:
Subreddits
Reddit is comprised of thousands of different communities, or subreddits. They can be created by any user around any subject, whether it’s a broad community (like with r/technology), or something as specific as a single joke. Each subreddit feeds into the full Reddit list of submissions meaning a post in any subreddit (unless it’s private) could reach the front page of the website.
While most posts on subreddits follow a particular format (text, links, pictures), many have different sets of rules on the content and things to include.
Upvoting and downvoting
Members of each community upvote and downvote its content based on quality and relevance, and the top content from each community feeds into Reddit’s “mixed feeds” (i.e. “the front page”).
If a post gets lots of upvotes it moves up the Reddit rankings so that more people can see it. If it gets downvotes it quickly falls and disappears from most people’s view.
Moderators
Moderators are the people who run subreddits. If you make your own, you’re a mod. But there can be multiple mods on larger subreddits where there are lots of posts.
Moderators will make sure redditors stick to the rules and uphold the standards of the subreddit. They’re not employed by Reddit.
Anonymity
Redditors are not required to share personal information to create an account, so they can be as anonymous as they’d like (or not). This means they may act a little differently to platforms where our posts are tied to our real life identities.
In our latest webinar, Reddit’s Ash Dunn describes the benefits: “In many ways that anonymity really empowers people and gives them a little bit of security to have some deeply personal conversations, whether that be around personal finance or sexuality.”
Engaging with people and communities on Reddit
Learn the rules
“Redditequette” is a funny thing, because it varies from area to area on the site.
Some subreddits have a lengthy set of rules about what can and can’t be posted, on what day, and with what label.
For example:
- Political data visualizations are only allowed on r/dataisbeautiful on Thursdays.
- r/gameofthrones has an incredibly lengthy set of rules on how to approach spoilers
- You can’t post fun facts on r/todayilearned if they’re less than two months old
If you’re going to engage with Reddit communities, make sure you’ve read the rules for the subreddit you’re posting to. All of them!
Do not spam
On Reddit, as in life, oversharing is frowned upon. Don’t attempt to clog up a subreddit with links to stuff you’ve made or to your website. Your posts are likely going to be removed automatically, and you’ll have to have a very good excuse to share with the subreddit mods if you’re going to get them reinstated.
Trial and error
If you’re going to make engaging with different communities on Reddit a regular part of your social efforts, keep track of how your posts and comments perform.
Try new things, keep your posts varied, and replicate what works.
By posting and commenting on things that don’t relate directly to your business as well as things that do, you’ll learn more about what kinds of posts go down well in the subreddits you’re interested in.
Getting a post on the front page
Here are Brandwatch React’s top tips for posting something that could get to the front page of Reddit (based on their experiences of getting data stories up to the top spot):
- Choose your subreddit: Which community will enjoy this most? Where is it most relevant?
- Don’t spam: Only posting your own links again and again will alert moderators and probably get your posts thrown off.
- Add value: If you’re not sure if you’re adding to a conversation (giving a subreddit’s readers something cool to think about or enjoy), don’t post.
- Know your audience: Leave your corporate voice at the door – you’re speaking to real people. Make sure to do your research on what resonates with communities on each subreddit.
- Know the rules: Each subreddit has their own rules, formats, and etiquette. Don’t deviate.
- Think about timing: Is everyone asleep? This probably isn’t the best time. If you want to get really granular, do some subreddit analysis to see when most people are active there.
- Be prepared: If your post does get a lot of upvotes, you could be facing a lot of traffic, a lot of comments, and (potentially) a lot of questions. Make sure you’re ready for it and able to engage in the conversations that follow.
Audiences on Reddit
With 330 million average monthly users, each with their own favorite subreddits to hang out in, there’s a whole mix of people on Reddit.
In turn, there are many ways to learn from them.
Demographics
Back in 2016, Pew Research conducted a survey that found Reddit users were 67% men and 64% between the ages of 18 and 29. It also found 70% of users were white.
But, because users are anonymous, generating demographic data in any kind of automatic way (using a tool like Brandwatch) is really hard. Instead, as Reddit’s Ash Dunn suggests in our latest webinar, you need to look at the context of posts (where they are posted and what they say) to learn about people on Reddit.
Audience preferences, and what resonates
To find out what goes down well within an audience hanging out on a particular subreddit, there are a few options which all complement each other.
- Spend time in the subreddit ‘IRL’: This allows analysts to see posts as they appear to regular Reddit users (as opposed to through an analytics platform). They can see what’s being upvoted, top comments, and general trends of the day on the subreddit.
- Deeper analysis of subreddits and posts: Using Brandwatch Consumer Research, analysts can search for topics that are being discussed on Reddit (to find out what’s trending within those conversations) or to look specifically at a subreddit (to see what’s trending within it, without particular keyword filters).
Levels of experience or expertise among communities
Like we’ve said above, Redditors tend to be anonymous. There isn’t an informative Twitter bio to go from or automatic gender categorization for names.
However, by looking at what people are posting, we can learn things about them.
For example, Brandwatch analyst Adam Brons-Smith recently studied the community posting on r/Golf. He was able to look at how people referred to their own handicaps in order to split the conversation out by experience levels.
Once he had this data, he could look at how people of different experience levels discussed different brands. With this information, brands can see how beginners vs pros are talking about their products and accessories.
How influence works on Reddit
Community > Individuals
Influencers aren’t really a thing on Reddit in the same sense that they exist on Instagram or Twitter.
Now and again you’ll get a famous user doing an AMA, which will get lots of people engaged and asking questions. Generally speaking, though, no user is more influential than another.
Instead, influence within the platform is pretty democratic – it’s dealt out using upvotes, and it doesn’t last forever. Someone might have a post hit the front page of Reddit one day and then not get any engagement at all on a post they write a week later.
The value of a “mega thread”
As Ash Dunn explains in our webinar with Reddit, one of the most valuable user posts for a brand is for them to post a “mega thread” about a new product. A successful mega thread will get lots of upvotes and lots of engagement, and brands mentioned will be able to get plenty of insights on popular opinions of their product.
Here’s an example:
Brand tracking
There are a couple of ways to track conversation around your brand using Reddit data, and they depend on whether your brand has a subreddit of its own or not.
Note: The subreddit may not be “owned” by the brand itself – anyone can create a subreddit, so one might have been created by someone outside of your employee base.
1. My brand has a subreddit
Video game series ‘Diablo’ has its very own subreddit where gamers can discuss the characters, plot, and their own strategies. This is a priceless source of information for game developers – they can find out what’s liked, what’s not liked, what’s discussed lots, what’s ignored, and more.
That said, not all brand-related mentions of Diablo in the r/Diablo subreddit actually mention the title of the game. Of course, everyone posting in the subreddit knows that they’re talking about Diablo. But if you’re tracking mentions of Diablo, and not the subreddit itself, you’re going to be missing out on a whole lot of data.
In fact, our analysis found that 79% of mentions in r/Diablo did not mention the game itself.
So, if you’re a brand that has a dedicated subreddit, make sure you’re tracking everything – not just mentions that contain keywords that relate to your products.
To track a subreddit in Brandwatch Consumer Research, your query should look something like this:
(site:reddit.com AND url:/r/Diablo)
2. My brand doesn’t have a subreddit
Brands that do not have a subreddit dedicated to them can still track how their brand is discussed on Reddit.
This simply involves making sure that all keywords relating to your brand or products are set up correctly and that you’re able to capture Reddit data.
If you have a broad brand query running across all available sites, you can use the following filter to just look at Reddit mentions:
site:reddit.com
If you want to write a query that just captures Reddit mentions of your brand or products, try something like this:
site:reddit.com AND (“brand name” OR “product name”)
Note: Whether or not your brand has a subreddit, it’s worth keeping track of subreddits relating to your industry so you can keep abreast of developing trends and stories that could affect your business. There’s a lot of important context out there that may not mention your brand at all.
Competitor benchmarking
Just like with any other social network, it’s important to keep an eye on the competition on Reddit. That said, things work a little bit differently to other social platforms.
For example, you’re not necessarily tracking owned channels – instead you’re tracking full on subreddits or keywords, all of which is user generated. This is quite different to tracking a competitors’ Twitter channel.
Let’s break things down with some examples:
Share of voice
Measuring how much your brand is mentioned compared to your competitors is obviously valuable – especially when you can get more granular and see what people are saying.
Monitoring of brand names can be site wide across Reddit, but also be wary to track subreddits relating to your competitors.
You can track things over time, too – for example, here are mentions of car brands on r/cars and how volumes changed between two months. Car Brand 1 had its biggest month in June, while Car Brand 2 had its biggest month in July. Regardless, Car Brand 2 has the biggest share of voice over the two month period.
By clicking on the bars in Brandwatch Consumer Research, you can see what’s driving this conversation for each brand over time, so if you spot competitor mentions rising you can find out why.
Other factors
Looking at share of voice can provide base level insights, but you can go much further by looking deeper into conversations.
With a bit more categorization, you can look at how brands compare on mentions that suggest purchase intent, how brands compare across conversations from people of different ability levels (see our golf example above), or how brands compare on complaints about particular product aspects (plane cancellations, or video game bugs, for example).
Crisis tracking
Reddit is where trends start and, potentially, where brand reputations go up in flames.
If your brand is gaining negative mentions on Reddit, it would be a mistake to write it off as an isolated event. It’s a springboard for viral stories, and if your brand is involved in any way with something that’s climbing the upvote ranks you really ought to know about it.
Predicting the worst
You know your company and the things that really set off alarm bells within it. When these things happen, you need to know – and fast.
With the help of a tool like Brandwatch Alerts, you can be notified almost immediately when conversation around a particular issue begins to stir.
If you’re in the fast food business, any mention of your brand name near the words “rats”, “mice”, or “cockroaches” needs to flagged and dealt with quickly. Even if your company has no history of a particular issue, having these alerts set up can ensure you’re prepared for the worst and that crisis protocols can be put into action as soon as possible after an issue is raised.
All this applies to social networks generally, but with Reddit you might want to take extra precautions. For example, if you’re in retail you may want to get notified if your brand name appears in the subreddit r/TalesFromRetail which can contain some pretty frank discussion of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
You’ll also want to set up special alerts for negative mentions occurring within any subreddits that are specifically about your brand (this is because these may not mention the brand by name – see what we wrote above on brand tracking on Reddit).
Unknown unknowns
Some issues can be hard to predict that don’t relate to known problems that are common in your company or industry.
“‘Unknown unknowns’ are a big issue for crisis detection as most alerts are only programmed to react based on what we can anticipate,” wrote Kristian Bannister, in his summary of how the United incident (in which a man was dragged from an overbooked plane) played out on social.
Airlines might be used to tracking mentions of “cancellation” or “lost luggage”, but could they have predicted “dragged”?
Luckily, keyword tracking isn’t the only way to get notified when things are going south on social. Brandwatch Signals notify stakeholders as soon as there are significant changes in the data, like jumps in negative sentiment.
There is a small catch here in that a crisis on Reddit could consist of a single post that gets lots of upvotes (which is not something a Signal would pick up). So, a mix of social Signals and custom Alerts are probably the best way forward.
Product feedback and service reviews
“What you find on Reddit is really detailed opinions and very thoughtful descriptions of how a person may be feeling about an experience – whether that be from a brand or a particular product or service,” says Reddit’s Ash Dunn.
It’s the detail that makes product feedback analysis one of the most valuable parts of Reddit data for brands.
Like in brand tracking, the analyst will need to split out mentions of products from the rest of the conversation by identifying and setting up tracking for subreddits dedicated to that product, and searching site-wide for product-related keywords.
Once you’ve filtered your data like this, you can sort them by sentiment or by further keyword categorization. You can also look at the most common words, phrases, organizations, places, emojis, and names that are being mentioned in this conversation.
Customer journey analysis
Earlier in our r/golf example we spoke about how we can break down levels of experience within different communities.
This kind of categorization can also apply to customer journey analysis – after all, a newbie and a pro golfer are likely to have different stages when it comes to buying new equipment.
In our webinar with Reddit, Brandwatch’s Adam Brons-Smith showed how much detail Redditors can go into about their purchase decisions with this example post from r/cars. As you can see, there are plenty of pieces of information that relate to what the poster is after and what they’re willing to pay for it.
This is valuable for companies not just because posts like this can be studied in isolation, but posts like this can be studied in general.
By searching for posts in r/cars that include words like “budget”, “considerations”, “pros”, “cons”, or “upgrade”, an auto brand could gather a whole bunch of posts that relate to what customers with different levels of experience or budget are discussing and the competing car brands they are considering.
It’s not just the consideration stage of the customer journey that can be analyzed here, either – plenty of car experts will weigh in with their thoughts and recommendations based on their own experiences. From consideration through to advocacy, there’s plenty that can be learned from Reddit data.