How Reddit Lets People Decide Your Marketing Success

Reddit is a social bookmarking/link sharing site similar to Digg or StumbleUpon. More than this though, it is a content aggregate site where you can find content voted best by other users and therefore selected for its popularity among the community. It was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, who were roommates and students at the University of Virginia, and was later acquired by Conde Nast Publications in 2006. Today it operates as a separate entity but with Advance (Conde Nast’s parent company) as the largest shareholder.

Reddit’s mission statement is to become the ‘front page of the internet’ and it achieves this by allowing users to select the sub-communities (called Subreddits) they wish to subscribe to and then showing them the top rated content for that community each day. You can find them at reddit.com/r/(nameofsubreddit). As a general rule of thumb, any content shared on Subreddits will need to gain a certain amount of traction before it will start appearing on the home page for individual users.

If you were to set up your own Reddit account, then you could select the topics and categories that interest you and then Reddit would show you the top content from each of those categories every day. This would likely include blog posts and other external links, along with ‘self-posts’, which are essentially just text posts designed to stimulate discussion within the community. You can also choose to view the Subreddits on your own and that way you only see the latest and most popular links and discussions for that particular topic.

The subreddits and front page have multiple separate categories accessible by tabs including ‘Hot’, ‘New’, ‘Rising’, ‘Controversial’, ‘Top’, ‘Gilded’ and ‘Promoted’. ‘Hot’ is the main page for that sub, while many visitors will also see ‘New’ and ‘Rising’. ‘Top’ is made up of the most voted posts of recent times in that sub based on popularity alone.

As an active Reddit user, you will be able to vote up and down on any content yourself, which will influence what content is seen and what is not. You will also be able to comment on others’ posts and participate in active discussions. Every time one of your own posts or comments is voted up or down, this will contribute to your overall “karma” on the site. You have two separate karma values: one for the content you’ve shared and one for the comments you’ve posted. Other users will be able to click on your profile and immediately see your previous posts as well as your rating. In this way, your overall karma can end up positively or negatively influencing the respect your subsequent posts are given. Some subreddits also have “minimum karma” requirements for posting or even commenting, which is a device meant to prevent spam.

Subreddits are controlled by moderators, like most forums, and have the ability to delete posts, add tags, and ban users. Anyone can create a new Subreddit, and by doing so, they automatically become a moderator. At the same time, you have the option to add more moderators to help you manage the page.

Those are the basic rules of Reddit marketing. If it sounds complicated, it’s only because there’s a lot going on below the surface. To use Reddit, you need to go to Reddit.com and read what’s there. On the other hand, to promote there all you need to do is create an account and then click the ‘submit’ button. However, understanding the nuances below the surface will help you get more out of it, both as a consumer and as a marketer.