Connect with Influencers on Reddit
In my previous post on using influencer marketing for content marketing purposes, I discussed ways to use influencers to drive a content marketing strategy.
The reverse, of course, is true–if you are generating content and have a defined audience in mind, using the right influencers can ensure that your hard work spreads far and wide.
There are countless communities and networks to focus on, but we’re going to focus on the somewhat unsung hero of distribution: Reddit.
Why Reddit?
It’s enormous in both size and engagement. According to Similarweb’s analysis of Reddit, it is the 25th most trafficked site in the world and the 12th in the U.S. There’s more to it than that; the average visit is over 10 minutes with 8+ pages per minute. That engagement is ridiculous. Per Reddit’s advertising team, the network has 234 million unique users, serving 8 billion (with a b) pageviews monthly.
According to Reddit’s 2015 year end statistics, there are 88,700 active subreddits (distinct niche communities), but what you might be interested in as a content marketer is some of the pageviews listed for some select pieces (warning: some are NSFW)…hot topics can receive hundreds of thousands of tracked pageviews.
I say tracked because as a community Redditors are extremely sensitive to ads and thus use services like Ghostery to obfuscate their browsing behavior–some experts suggest that the traffic originating from Reddit may actually be twice what is trackable.
OK, but what can specific Redditors do?
While as a community they can occasionally be exceptionally cruel, there are examples of the banding together to incredible things. How did these incredible things kick off though? Every submitted thread and URL shared starts with one person. If it is a truly great cause, yes, it will probably make some headway, but in each of these cases, it started with a specific user with a high level of karma, the measuring stick for others to determine perceived quality without needing to investigate further. As a quick note, comment karma > post karma because it is a better arbiter of community engagement.
Even when doing positive things, beware that sometimes too much of a good thing can be temporarily bad, via the Reddit hug of death. Can your server handle several thousand concurrent users? Yes? Let’s dive in then.
Find the Right Category
There are some handy tools available to help you navigate what is otherwise a somewhat simplistic UI that is tough to parse given the sheer amount of data. First, we are going to assume that you understand the buyer persona for this piece of content. You know who you want to read it and the actions you want them to take. Thus, we can start figuring out which categories to target.
Find the Right Redditor
Assuming you found the right category(ies) to target, you can now start reading up on the various community rules and see who the major players are. This can be a very tedious process as each subreddit can have contradictory rules, even though they are closely related. Trust me, I’ve learned the hard way.
If you want an easier way out, you can just take the category and plug it into Snoopsnoo.com. In this way you can pick all the users that have a “hot” submission and run them through the Snoopsnoo tool to see what content they mostly post about–yes, you can use this as a quick and dirty way to filter down from the initial large list of Redditors, to zero in on the handful that appear to be most aligned with what you want to promote.
Engage
You’ve found some Redditors; time to focus and make it count. What you don’t want to do is immediately spam a key influencer and ruin your chances. Consider this step-by-step process:
- Join the Reddit community(ies) that you’re targeting.
- Leave intelligent comments on the posts and comments of your intended influencer targets.
- After you receive positive feedback from those targets, direct message with a question–state that you’re working on a piece and could use their feedback [don’t ask them to submit it].
- If you get feedback, as if you can reference them from within the post.
- After the post is complete, ask if they think it is good enough for you submit–some will say yes, and will upvote it…better, some will offer to submit it for you.
Next Iteration of Content
Content marketing, when done properly, never ends. There’s always more sources of traffic to go after. This time, since you are now hooked on Reddit traffic and all the secondary benefits that come from it (press, links, mentions), you can specifically design content for a subreddit during a high growth phase, so let’s look at one final tool: Reddit Metrics.
For predicting trends of popular subreddits I prefer Reddit Metrics to Reddit List, because it allows a user to see which groups are growing fastest over different time periods, trends on new subreddits being created, etc. If you can catch a group in the hockey stick phase of growth, and get an influencer to share your content before they are bombarded by everyone to share, you can set yourself up for some significant growth, and build a new iterative content creation process that can carry you for years to come.