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Reddit as a marketing tool? Absolutely! We dive into the world of Reddit marketing with Brent Csutoras, as we explore how to understand customer sentiment, become active in relevant communities, the importance of karma points, and leveraging Reddit’s growing presence in Google search results.
Reddit for Marketers: Boost Your Brand Summary
Key Takeaways
- What is Reddit: Reddit is a valuable platform for understanding customer sentiment, pain points, and having authentic conversations.
- Authenticity First: Becoming an active, genuine member of relevant subreddit communities is crucial before any marketing efforts.
- SEO Benefits: Reddit comments/discussions are increasingly appearing in google search results due to their value in the user journey.
- Keeping It Real: Karma points and moderation practices aim to maintain quality discussions and curb manipulation.
Unlocking Reddit’s Potential for Effective Marketing and Social Listening
In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, staying ahead of the curve requires leveraging platforms that offer authentic engagement and valuable insights. One such platform is Reddit. Often overlooked by marketers, Reddit is a goldmine for understanding customer sentiment and engaging with communities. Let’s explore how Reddit can be a powerful tool for your marketing strategy and social listening efforts.
Reddit: More Than Just a Social Media Site
Reddit isn’t your typical social media platform. It’s a vibrant ecosystem of communities, known as subreddits, each with its own unique culture, rules, and members. Unlike traditional social networks, Reddit thrives on genuine interactions and long-form discussions, making it an ideal platform for marketers who value authentic engagement over superficial metrics.
Harnessing Reddit for Social Listening
One of the most compelling reasons to include Reddit in your marketing toolkit is its unparalleled ability for social listening. By tapping into relevant subreddits, marketers can gain valuable insights into customer pain points, preferences, and behaviors. Redditors are known for their candidness, providing unfiltered feedback that can be more insightful than what you might gather from other platforms.
To get started with social listening on Reddit, identify subreddits that align with your brand or industry. Use these communities to understand what people are saying about your products, services, and competitors. This information can inform your marketing strategies, product development, and customer service approaches.
Building Authentic Community Engagement
Engaging with Reddit communities requires a different approach than other social platforms. Here are some key strategies to succeed on Reddit:
- Become a Genuine Member: Before diving into marketing efforts, spend time becoming an active member of relevant subreddits. Participate in discussions, offer valuable insights, and build rapport with community members. Authenticity is crucial on Reddit, and users can quickly spot self-serving behavior.
- Respect Community Norms: Each subreddit has its own set of rules and cultural norms. Familiarize yourself with these guidelines to ensure your interactions are well-received. Failure to respect these norms can result in your posts being removed or your account being banned.
- Leverage Karma Points: Reddit’s karma system is designed to reward valuable contributions. Earning karma by posting quality content and engaging in meaningful discussions can increase your credibility and visibility within the community.
Reddit and SEO: A Winning Combination
Reddit is increasingly appearing in Google search results, offering marketers a unique opportunity to boost their brand’s visibility. Discussions and comments on Reddit often rank highly in search results, providing valuable context and insights for users.
To take advantage of this, marketers should focus on creating content that resonates with the user journey. By participating in discussions and providing valuable information, you can position your brand as a trusted source of information. This approach not only enhances your SEO efforts but also builds trust with potential customers.
The Power of Storytelling on Reddit
Storytelling plays a pivotal role in successful Reddit marketing. By sharing compelling narratives that resonate with the audience, marketers can guide users through the decision-making process. Reddit’s format allows for in-depth conversations and storytelling, providing an ideal platform for brands to connect with their audience on a deeper level.
Focus on crafting stories that highlight your brand’s values, mission, and unique selling points. Encourage community members to share their experiences with your brand, creating a ripple effect of authentic testimonials.
Overcoming Challenges and Maintaining Quality
Navigating Reddit’s complex landscape requires patience and persistence. It’s crucial to maintain quality discussions and avoid the temptation to cut corners for quick wins. Building a strong presence on Reddit is a long-term strategy that pays dividends through genuine community engagement and enhanced brand reputation.
To maintain quality, marketers should focus on providing real value to the community. Avoid overt self-promotion and instead contribute insights, advice, and solutions that address users’ needs. This approach will help you build a loyal following and establish your brand as a respected voice in your industry.
Conclusion
Reddit offers a unique and powerful platform for marketers willing to invest the time and effort to understand its nuances. By leveraging Reddit for social listening, engaging authentically with communities, and focusing on storytelling, brands can unlock new opportunities for growth and success.
As digital marketing continues to evolve, platforms like Reddit will play an increasingly important role in shaping consumer perceptions and driving meaningful engagement. Embrace Reddit’s potential, and you’ll be well on your way to a more effective and impactful marketing strategy.
Reddit for Marketers: Boost Your Brand Episode Transcript
Rich: My guest today has been a Reddit expert for 18 years. He maintains direct connections to the platform’s team and has successfully assisted brands like Purple, Condé Nast, and TikTok on Reddit. Today we’re going to uncover what you need to know to succeed on Reddit with Brent Csutoras. Brent, welcome to the podcast.
Brent: Thanks for inviting me, Rich. It’s a pleasure. And honestly, it doesn’t take much to get me to talk. It probably takes more to get me to shut up. And when it comes to Reddit, as you mentioned, I’ve been on Reddit since the very beginning. I probably know more stories than I should, and always happy to share as much as I can.
I definitely always want people to be successful on Reddit. And it’s the one place that I think people have the biggest struggle figuring out how to be successful. So happy to help and happy to share.
Rich: Yeah, I’m looking forward to this conversation because I love Reddit as a user. I’ve been on the platform for not a long time, maybe the last three to five years is where I’ve been most active. And it’s usually what I do when I’m trying to avoid Facebook is I’ll get on Reddit so I can improve my woodworking skills, or my gardening skills, or learn about some new video games. So I’m interested to look at it from a marketing and business perspective.
Like we said, you’ve been on the platform for nearly 20 years, two decades. So how have things changed on the platform since the early days?
Brent: Oddly enough, the one thing that I really do think has been a credit to the success of Reddit is that not much really has changed. And even the design style of it, you can always type in a subdomain OLD in front of Reddit, and you’ll see Reddit the way it used to look. And you can really disable quite a few of the design upgrades they’ve made over the years.
But outside of giving you some visual kind of elements and the whole kind of timeline look that we’ve seen progress over the years, not a lot has changed. And algorithmically and the way it works and the way that the company kind of functions also really hasn’t changed much. It’s really meant to be a hands-off approach to allowing people a place to build a community. I always used to say it really services the mentality of the forum users who evolved out of forums but didn’t evolve out of that kind of flow of conversation. And it’s really allowed people to have open conversations.
You mentioned being a user. I oddly enough started on Reddit as a marketer. But I think I’ve always been somebody who believed in storytelling and believed in the authenticity of marketing and the long-term value over the short-term cheat or hack. I’ve always played with that side of the game because I want to know what’s going on, but I’ve always really liked the long-term element of it. So I think that allowed me to really walk that middle line.
And I was close to the people that built these companies. I was in San Francisco, I had met Alexis Ohanian. I had met Steve. There was only like six people at Reddit at the time. They were in the back office of the Wired building. And so when you went in there, there was just three desks with computers on it. And that was Reddit. And I had become an alpha tester, I was connected to some of the people who built Yahoo! Buzz. So I was an alpha tester for Yahoo! Buzz, Stumble Upon, Delicious. At that time period, I was very much involved in that kind of growth so I knew where the line was for where you could use it with a marketing intent, but not really abuse it. And that was the line I always wanted to walk. And I think it worked out for me in the long run.
Rich: You are just bringing up such feelings of nostalgia for me, as you mentioned things like digg and Stumble Upon, which I remember loving. And then certain things ebb and flow on the internet, especially if you’ve been doing them as long as we have.
And I just realized as we’re talking now, I’m very familiar with Reddit, but as popular as Reddit is, it also is not necessarily as well-known as some of the other platforms. If you’re at a cocktail party and you mention Reddit and somebody says, “Hey, what’s that all about?” What’s the elevator pitch for what Reddit is?
Brent: I typically tell people, Reddit is not a social media site. Sometimes I’ll refer to it similar to WordPress, where just because there’s a million WordPress sites out there doesn’t mean they’re all connected. They’re connected in the sense that you understand the general flow of how sites work. They work, but they’re each individual, right?
So the way I typically will describe Reddit is, it’s a dashboard to surface the most popular content from all of the communities that you belong in, but that each individual community is in itself individual, and has its own set of rules, its own tone, its own people, its own moderators, and it’s only connected by the platform that surfaces that popular content for you.
Rich: So these communities are known as subreddits. And basically they’re little fiefdoms that anybody could, I’m guessing, so correct me if I’m wrong, but anybody could create if you have a certain topic. I know that there’s one for Maine, I know there’s one for Portland, Maine, which obviously are local to me, but then I also follow ones on comic books, and video games, and woodworking, and DIY. And what you’re saying is each one has moderators for these, and they make the house rules up for each one of these subreddits?
Brent: Yeah, exactly. And Reddit has some basic rules, right? There’s don’t break the law, don’t hack the site. There’s some basic kind of rules that they have that all subreddits have to adhere to. I will say that there is never a blanket rule. This covers 99.9% of it.
When you have a subreddit that inadvertently becomes extremely popular, like me and you create a subreddit, and before we know it, it’s got 40 million followers and it’s playing a role in shaping internet culture. It’s adjusting real world political culture. If we start getting into that zone, obviously somebody starts paying a little more attention to it.
There has been times when admins have been put in as moderators because there’s an implication to the success of that subreddit and how it’s managed. And I think that’s respectable. I think that’s understandable from the company’s standpoint. But they have always been pretty strong on… and I remember when subreddits first came out, I was an alpha tester so I got to make the subreddits before anyone else. And I said, this kind of feels silly. Like you have a news subreddit that was like, there was a world news subreddit that wasn’t allowed to post U.S. content. They didn’t want U.S. news in it. So I was like, that’s silly that they’re like kicking out a certain subset of that group.
And Alexis would always, in the Reddit standpoint at time, was always like, “Then go make your own subreddit. If you don’t like the way one subreddit is working, then go make your own subreddit.” Make it better and people will like it. And let the community figure it out. But they would never really step in and take a stance.
But yes, you can absolutely create your own subreddit. You are the moderator. You pick the rules. Some rules are really wild. There was once, I don’t know if it’s still the same. I’ve been trying to find it, but there was once a cat subreddit where every single title of the post just had to say, ‘cat’. It was just like, and there’s little silly kind of rules and things on each subreddit and sometimes they’ll say you can’t talk about things in a certain way, or you can’t use these words.. So it really gets nuanced, and it gets interesting pretty quick.
Rich: Or you can’t post memes to this particular subreddit, but there’s a similar one that allows you to. So you have to just follow those rules.
Now Reddit has recently gone public. It’s made significant deals with Google and open AI and others. How do you think those developments are going to impact Reddit’s role from a marketing standpoint?
Brent: This is a conversation I’ve been having a lot lately with my business partner, Bartosz, and a handful of other experts behind the scenes. And I want to quantify this statement. I don’t know if that’s the right word. Sometimes I just go with the flow on words. But what I want to say is that I’m somebody who reads a lot and I’m somebody who pays a lot of attention. I’ve read a lot of books. I read a lot of articles. But I’m not somebody who always remembers the exact number. I don’t always remember the exact statistic. I’m more of like, how does that play into my understanding of how things work, more than being a librarian and really knowing all of those.
So I say that because I believe that right now what we’re seeing is a rebalancing of a way that marketing has gone against the grain for how human psychology makes decisions. I love Jonah Berger’s book, Catalyst. It talks about getting people to change their mind. And you look at Contagious, another book that he does where he talks about when we’re marketers, we tend to plan on what we think people will do from a very logical standpoint. But people tend to make decisions very emotionally and sometimes against their own judgment.
And so I think that what we’ve gotten away from is this real true science that says people don’t need things to be necessarily accurate. They don’t need things to be perfect. But what they need to have is a feeling that they came to a decision on their own. And a feeling that they got that information in a very organic way from somebody like themselves that they trust and that there’s a sense of certainty to that decision they made.
I think when we went into digital marketing, we really drove towards telling people what they should want. This is what you want. This is the best computer. This is the way that you’re supposed to think. And I think it worked for a while because it was new, it was novel. It was something that gave us more options and allowed us to still make our own choice. But I think over time that choice has gone down. It feels more like we’re being told what to do. And I think that has led to a lot of people being just not satisfied with the shopping experience, the search experience.
And what I think Reddit has purposefully inadvertently done, is they have allowed an area where people are discussing various different viewpoints on a topic, but not in a way to tell you what to think. They’re talking about it from their own perspective, their own belief. And when you get a collection of 40 or 50 people who are not writing one sentence like that sucks, they’re writing 20 paragraphs about every single thing that they know about it. They’re really trying to make their case. When you go through that depth, you walk away feeling like you made your own decision. You made it based on something that you trust. These are real people. It’s not influenced by money. It’s not influenced by marketing dollars. And I think that is missing from the current search experience.
And so you see Google making this deal, you see open AI making this deal, because they know that problem resolution is a part of adoption. You’re not going to adopt a technology that doesn’t solve a problem for you, right? And so ChatGPT needs to solve a problem, not hallucinate all the time, not tell people what they need, but to give them the information to make a decision. And where we always lacked with that technology is the inability to have that personalized feel.
Well LLMs have given these technologies the ability to communicate with us in a way that we can understand. And I talk about this sometime in the past about influencer marketing. Smartphones made influencers effective because psychologically, when we see somebody talk to us on a phone and they’re talking like a normal human being and admitting faults, that reminds me of my mom, it reminds me of my brother. And we got really accustomed to that being a natural form of communication.
So psychologically, just like you get that itch on your leg and it feels like a vibration of your phone, you can change those kind of neurological reminders. And we feel comfortable looking at somebody who’s talking to us in a normal tone, even if we don’t know them, they feel like a friend. Well LLMs have allowed marketing, search, all these other places to have that same interaction.
So what I think Reddit’s doing is I think that LLMs and Reddit are two separate parts of the story. But what they’ve shown us is there is a way for us to be influenced by information and data, and there’s a pathway for doing that. And it requires more in-depth conversation from real people where we feel like in the end, we make our own decision for ourselves. And where marketers, in my opinion, really need to start focusing on is where they fit in the user journey, where storytelling is happening, and how they can guide people along the way to help them make the decision for themselves.
And that’s the sweet spot I think we’re going to get back to. And that’s where I think Reddit’s playing a role, not only in getting people there today through showing up in search and having the platform, but by showing us what as marketers, what people really want as we evolve.
Rich: And I want to come back to being an active part of Reddit as a marketer. But before we even get to that, you tease this a little bit how can marketers use Reddit as a research tool.
Because just anecdotally, I know one time we had a client and they thought something about their clientele. And I went and I found a subreddit of their clientele, not their clientele specifically, but their ideal customer profile. And I looked at it and I’m like, they don’t get what the pain points of their customers are. And I actually took screenshots and brought them back to them to support the argument I was trying to make. What are some ways that as marketers, we can use research as part of our Reddit experience?
Brent: You mentioned it right there and we have some tools, like you can look at what Google’s polling. You can look at what, other sources are pulling when they reference Reddit, right? Reddit search is not always the greatest, to be honest, they’re working on it. It’s improving, but you have to know how to search in Reddit.
So a lot of times what I’ll do is I’ll look for subreddits that are related to a search. I go into that subreddit, then I search keywords based on comments. Then I start going into comments to start getting a sentiment. So it’s a bit of a process, unfortunately today to do that, as you probably experienced when you went in looking for that. But I think that you really nailed it right there in itself, is that just by going to read it and separating your mindset from saying, what did my customers really think about me?
Because the problem is that we’re stuck in a cycle of looking, I don’t want to say the wrong information, because it’s not the wrong information, but it’s just not the right information. And if you’re going to go and do search, what are you looking at? You’re looking at your competitors in search that are already ranking for certain reasons or certain factors. So you’re limited by the scope of what you actually understand about your users because you’re assuming that your competitors, what data is telling us is telling you what people want. But people don’t make decisions based on logic. They base them off of a lot of emotion. They might come back to logic, but initially there’s a lot of emotion to that.
So how do you get that story from them? You could go get surveys, right? But when you’re surveying somebody, they go into a logical mindset when they answer. That’s why people will tell you all day, I’m going to go right if you ask me to do this. And then when you watch them, they actually go left. Why is that? So that’s where I think Reddit can be great for research, because when you go in there and really listen to what people are saying, and why not use LLMs, right?
Go download a thousand threads on Reddit about your brand. Go download all Captara reviews about your brand. Put them in an LLM as a PDF or something, and then say, “Based on these data sets only, what are the correlations that you see that I don’t?” You can start to get a sense for what the real sentiment is, and then take that to the other side of the equation where you’re looking at your competitors, you’re looking at all of that.
But if you’re in marketing and you haven’t noticed a pretty significant shift towards user journey solution, then you really need to start paying attention, because that’s what the metric that all of these platforms are looking for.
Rich: All right. That makes a lot of sense. Love it. So I noticed you’re wearing a T-shirt that says “SEO” on it. If you’re just listening to this, big SEO right across Brent’s chest. I love SEO as well, and you and I have both seen Reddit become a major result within the search engines. It feels two outta three searches I do, near the top of the page above the fold are Reddit conversations that are going on as an SEO.
Are there things I should be paying attention or changing my behavior as an SEO to take advantage of this fairly new phenomenon? Even though it’s been there in the past, it hasn’t been there to the degree that it is now.
Brent: Yeah, absolutely. I think you need to look for the patterns. Like when you see that… John Mueller, I think, did a great quote. And I’m going to paraphrase it, but he was talking about this exact issue. Why is Reddit showing up and what should I do about it? And what he made a good point of saying – and again, paraphrasing – is that a searcher needs a multitude of different things to make a decision. And if you look at the page of the query that you’re looking at, you’re going to see different points of solution presented. And one of those points is very much right now Reddit. And that’s because of the things we just talked about. And they know that statistically speaking, they’re seeing that journey complete.
One of the other things that I’ve written about and we’ve talked about, and it’s not something that you haven’t seen, is that you start typing a query in Google today and you’re going to see a suggest query, where it puts the suggest dropdown. You’re going to see one of those options has the word ‘Reddit’ at the end. And that’s because at a certain point, people have been searching and forcing Reddit results so much that it really did probably lead, and I make an assertion there, probably did lead to that deal to say, we want to present this information more real time faster.
But I think when you’re looking at a search result and you’re looking at where people are in their user journey, think about what’s not being solved by a deep conversation. And then that’s where you can potentially go into Reddit surface content or create conversations or create engagement around those areas, and then look to see if you can’t get those results.
Now I’m going to tell you we’ve been testing this a lot, and I will say it’s a lot of work that’s gone into testing it. But we can within 48 hours normally change that result or add a Reddit result to a search query. Because you can see when you really look at the page and you really dissect it, you can start to understand what the need that is lacking, and you can start to see what Google wants to add to that search experience to help solve that searcher’s intent.
Rich: Let me make sure I understand what you said, because it’s potentially fascinating. So if I’m an SEO – either in-house or working in agency on the behalf of one of my clients – and I’m doing these searches on Google and I see the kind of searches that are being pulled the results that are being pulled, and I want to get my brand or my client into that conversation, are you saying that I could, if I’m sophisticated enough, go in or become part of that conversation and that might surface something that would ultimately be beneficial to my brand?
Brent: Absolutely. But I would take it back to a very holistic place. When you’re doing content creation and you go and look at all the pain points that you’re solving for your audience, and you realize that you don’t have an article that solves that pain point, you’re going to create that article. It could be because of SEO, but it could also be because you care about solving your audience’s problem.
I like to think about it very holistically. If there is a search query that’s happening that you’re a solution for, and Reddit is not there, and you can go and bring value to Reddit by creating a presence, by having these conversations. I like to verbalize it by saying, you go in and create a conversation to help your audience who is on Reddit, some 90 million people a day uniques on Reddit, go to a place where storytelling is happening, have a part in that conversation, provide value. Google’s looking for that. They’re going to rank you for it.
I wouldn’t say go and manipulate search, because that’s just never been the point I start with. And I do believe that verbally and psychologically where you start from and your intent has an impact in the work that you do. So I always try to provide value, and then understand how that value inadvertently will lead to search success.
Rich: I love that approach. As we’re talking about this, we’re now into the phase where as marketers, we’re being active on the platform. And I know that some marketers are looking for really fast results, either internally or there’s external pressure on them to get these results. And sometimes we cut corners, we pick up our megaphone. Talk to me a little bit about some of the behaviors that don’t fly on Reddit that might get a shadow ban or outright ban from the platform.
Brent: Yeah, this is really tough because everybody thinks that the internet makes some big exception for how you’re supposed to operate in a social environment. I remember early on in my career, I would say there’s no difference between social online and social offline. The same rules apply. If you’re going to walk across the street to a community center and you’re going to join a social group of people there, and you want to become a part of that community, what are you going to do? Are you going to walk in, walk right up on stage, grab the mic and say, “Here, I’ve got something to tell you, and you’re all going to listen to me.” How’s that going to go? Are you going to go in and start promoting yourself here?
You’ve seen conferences, people passing out business cards to every person they see, no context, no nothing. There are feelings that just push the envelope, right? All of those apply. When you go into any community, you need to respect the fact that this is an individual community. And everybody wants to go, “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” You say every subreddit is different, but it’s probably all the same. It’s not. And that doesn’t work in Reddit. You can’t just treat it like Facebook and you’re just going to go around and tell everybody what you think.
So first and foremost, be a user. Honestly, there are so many fun subreddits. Anything that you’re passionate about. If you like growing peppers, like my friend Bart, then go in and join a pepper growing subreddit. Go into, there’s probably 20 of them, and go in and participate because it allows you to start growing peppers. Seeing how people talk. How do they comment? How do threads unfold? How do people get on tangents where they’re using one-, line, little sarcastic comments to go on for an hour, and the challenge to come up with that next comment. And you have to be passionate about what you’re doing on Reddit to understand how to be a part of that community. Even outside of Reddit.
I used to always tell people and companies, “You haven’t done social media. Which one do you personally use? Start there.” Because if you don’t personally use it, you’re not going to understand the nuances. You’re not going to open it back up. So become a personal user first. Then take the time to start looking into your professional fields. Where are these conversations happening? How are they happening? You could go to a place that really talks about one topic, like growing peppers, and you could think, okay this is a growing pepper. But if you listen to it, they might say we only grow green peppers. That’s all we’re really about. And anybody that talks about a red pepper is going to get trashed or told to go somewhere else. Now, it doesn’t say that in a rule anywhere, but if you want to talk about peppers there professionally and you only grow red peppers, it’s not the subreddit for you. You’re never going to bypass that kind of resistance to the community.
So don’t swim upstream on Reddit, right? Take the time to become a user, really understand the subreddit you want to participate in, understand the rules. If your end goal is I want to post content with a link in the subreddit. And there is a rule that says, do not post content with links in the subreddit, you’re not going to get around that. You’re just going to have to move to another subreddit or change your strategy or figure it out.
So I think that understanding the rules, and then understanding how you actually provide value to that, is super important. Because just knowing the rules and getting into some of those things doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to be successful. So you want to provide value. You want people to notice that you’re a part of that community.
Another thing I will tell people is to pay attention to the moderators. They own and run that subreddit. If a moderator doesn’t have a rule that says, “I don’t like red peppers”, and you start talking about red peppers, they’re still likely to not receive your content the same way. So take a look at the moderators. What do they submit? What other subreddits are they on? Where are they moderators? What kind of comments do they make? Learn who the moderators are. Learn who the top users are. And then once you’re comfortable, start commenting and engaging first. Get a sense for how people are going to respond to the way you talk. It’s a lot easier to learn in a comment that’s half buried than when you submit a post and you’re now the center of attention for that whole entire subreddit to see and to criticize.
I literally will tell people, this should take you three months. You shouldn’t be jumping in any faster than that. If you are, then that’s the sign that you’ve gone too far and you need to step back a little bit. And a lot of people are going to say, and they always say, that’s a long time. And I used to have people who’ve been in conferences say, “How can I do all of that, but without the year it takes to do that?” Don’t. We’re at a point where this is not that community, this is not that place. You need to be patient, you need to learn, and you need to really have a long-term goal.
If you don’t see the long-term value, if you don’t see how Google, who never outsources solutions to anyone is all of a sudden outsourcing half of their search solutions to Reddit and the ChatGPT is now looking to Reddit. If you don’t see what everyone else in the industry is seeing, then you need to spend more time seeing it and understanding where we’re going as marketers. And realize a long-term strategy on Reddit is really a smart play.
Rich: I think that’s a great start. One of the other things that I’m thinking about as a user of the platform that I don’t pay attention to because I’m mostly consuming, unless I have a question about yard work or DIY or whatever, is the idea of karma points.
So what are some of the actions that we can take on the platform, coming from an authentic standpoint, that will increase our visibility or increase our reach or increase our ability to share our knowledge with others?
Brent: And it’s an interesting point, because you talk about what’s changed earlier on in the conversation. And I will say, probably only two things have changed on Reddit that I can really reach to. One is, marketing was never allowed on Reddit. That’s why you hear the whole history in the past of people being afraid to go on Reddit as a business, afraid to be involved because it’s like Redditors hate marketers, right? And the truth is, nobody hates marketing. People just hate being blindly marketed to, right? And we all appreciate that.
The second thing is karma. Karma used to mean absolutely nothing. It didn’t matter. In fact, we used to burn accounts. Like when we got a 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 karma, that was time to delete that account because that meant we had too much attention, too much visibility, too much expectation, right? We didn’t want that. We want it to be more a casual conversation. So I would delete accounts once I had that much karma and start over.
Nowadays, karma has a bigger impact. And not only karma, but Reddit has released a contributor quality score as well. And so they’re looking at overall actions and overall elements. And do you have a verified email? And how long have you been in certain subreddits? But inside of subreddits, there is through automod, the ability to limit what people can do in that subreddit based on how much karma they have. So almost carte blanche, you’re going to find a lot of subreddits will say, “you cannot submit anything to this subreddit unless you have at least X amount of karma, unless you’ve been X amount of days old.” Most all the subreddits I run, and I have some that are over a million members, and all of them you have to have a certain amount of karma, because it’s not hard to get karma and so forth.
Now to your question, how do you get karma? Start with low resistance subreddits. Ask Reddit is a place where everybody’s just looking for advice and it’s easy for you to find a comment that you could give advice on, and your advice would be good. Sometimes it’s like a place where cats, all they want to see is cute pictures of cats. You got a kitten, go take a couple pictures, go to a pet store and take some pictures. Say, “I went to the pet store and saw this beautiful little kitten.” You’re going to get 300 karma just from posting a picture of a kitten.
So there’s places on Reddit, there’s subreddits, and there’s actually, if you search, there is a subreddit post from a really established subredditor that literally lists all the low effort, kind of low resistance subreddits that you can go and submit content to in order to start to get a feel for how this whole thing works to build some karma. So I would definitely go and find some things that you’re passionate about, because it makes it easier. The trick that I would say, if you want a little hack for it, you can sort Reddit content by ‘rising’. ‘Rising’ simply means content that is picking up in popularity and might go to the top of a subreddit.
Remember, the front page of Reddit is a dashboard for all of your subreddits. So if you have 20 subreddits, it’s pretty much going to show you the number one from each subreddit inside your dashboard. Because it’s trying to give you all of your subreddits, not just one. So when you hit the top of a subreddit, you’re breaking out into a wider visibility across all users, and people that are logged out see the most popular content spread across popular subreddits. So as you’re getting content popular, it’s getting a lot more exposure. So if you’re watching the rising and there’s a topic that you can relate to, and it only has two or three comments, then you can jump in there and get a comment in the top three or four comments. That hits the front page, now you’re going to get 400 or 500 potential votes.
Now if it’s a bad comment, you might get 400 or 500 negative votes, and your karma is a balance between how many positive votes you get and how many negative votes you get. So yes, you can go and find low resistance. And yes, you can find rising topics to go jump on. But if you half ass it and just put some dumb comment in there, you’re going to find you’re now negative 300 or 400 karma, not positive. And then you’re going to start having to swim against the grain again, go against the grain. So be smart about it, but absolutely use rising topics and find the low resistance comment opportunities.
Rich: Okay. Now I noticed that many of the users, if not the vast majority of users that I see on Reddit have, I won’t call them anonymous handles, but like the ones that Reddit generates for you. I feel like I’m @therichbrooks on every platform, so that’s what I got when I got on Reddit. And it just seems to me that it’s like I’m one of the very few that actually puts their identity out there. So it seems very easy for me to create a hundred different accounts, build up a little bit of karma, and then just pile on some comment that @therichbrooks makes. What are some of the things that are in place in Reddit to prevent this kind of bad behavior and this manipulation of the karma algorithm, if you will?
Brent: Absolutely. I used to always be able to work with the team early on. And even at that time, they would say, “Hey, can we promote this?” Or, “We can promote that.” And I got opportunities to post stuff on Reddit that nobody else had seen, some new feature or something. And sometimes I would have to message Alexis and say, “Hey, my post got banned”, and he’d be like, hold on, let me go see. And he’d say, “Oh, I don’t know why that happened. Here, let me put it back.” And he’d put it back and we’d go through that.
So from the very beginning I’ve always said, Google might not ban a hundred spammers, because they want to avoid banning the one good person. It doesn’t care. They’re like, I’ll ban a hundred good people just to get that one bad person. So right off the bat, they’ve always been really good at seeing patterns. Because the reality is, you can change IPs and you can change accounts, but there’s normally always some level of correlation between what you’re voting on and what you’re viewing and what you’re visiting and what you’re doing.
And Reddit has always been really good at looking at that. And then either they don’t always shadow ban you right away, but they will discredit those votes. So you’ll think you’re voting, voting, voting up and you’re seeing things happening, but really only one of those votes count, right? And if you do it too much, then all of them get shadow banned, or you get banned.
Or like what happens with me, every time I open up a moderated thing in my subreddit mod cube, I opened the account and I look and I say, “Hey, what’s going on with this? What’s going on with that?” And I’ll go into all of looking at what the user’s doing. I’ll open up all their comments. Are they posting the same comment in a bunch of places? Are they voting on the same person who submitted? I can go in and start seeing that. And if I see a pattern that looks like you’re a spammer, then I’ll just ban you permanently from the subreddit and I’ll never think twice about it again. And that’s it. That’s the end of it for that account.
On top of that, Reddit knows what’s coming. And they’ve known what’s been coming along with their growth for a long time. They actually have integrated AI and they’re continuing to release new and improved features. But right now, if you get an account and then you go submit and you register another account, they’re looking for that. And so I get little notifications, “This looks like somebody who created a second account.” “This looks like somebody who’s creating multiple accounts.” And it will give me information in my back, and it tells me about these users and it blocks automatically people that it thinks are making multiple accounts.
So they’re using a lot of tools to combat that. And ultimately it works pretty well. Can you get past it? Yeah, absolutely. There’s people who get past it by being really smart and so forth. But most of the time the content still has to perform. So if I always say, if you’re trying to share something that’s really valuable and you’ve managed to figure out some really creative way to make it successful and it helps a bunch of people, did you do anything really wrong? Probably to some people, yes. But if the content’s still good, that’s what’s really going to shine. At the end of the day, you can get it to the front page. And five minutes later, if it’s crap content, it’s gone. And if they go in and look at it and say, this should have never gotten here. Guess what? All those accounts are gone too. So it’s a short-lived kind of strategy, in the end.
Rich: All right. Now you’ve worked with some of the big brands that we talked about earlier in your bio on their Reddit strategies. Any interesting takeaways or stories that you can share with us about the ways that they may have used Reddit, either now or in the past?
Brent: TikTok’s probably my favorite story. That one was a lot of fun. Basically that was during a time period when they were really blowing up YouTube. There were just every ad on YouTube was a TikTok ad. And TikTok was really fun because I knew that it was a new enough app that it was like, I didn’t know the full scope of it, but I definitely knew people on Reddit didn’t likeTikTok. And it was this kind of push to say we want to get more users. We want to get more downloads. We want to turn the tide of what people were thinking.
So I posted a bunch of ads that were like, let’s do this challenge. Let’s do some of these TikTok challenges back when they were very first starting. And I went away to grab a cup of coffee, and by the time I came back, I had 350 messages in the account that were everything from, “you should kill yourself.” It was pretty crazy. And right off the bat, I was like, man, this is going to be a challenging day. But what we did is we really just settled into just participating in almost a sarcastic way. People would say, “Hey, go back to YouTube.” And I’d say, “Hey, I heard there’s a lot of TikTok ads there.” And so we would have some fun with it.
And then they had a gift that you could give away at the time that was called a Reddit Gold, they would allow you to give these awards. And so I would give people these Gold subscriptions. Alexis once described it as like a virtual six pack, I’m buying you a virtual six pack. And so we would give all of our most critical people these awards. And then they would say, “I can’t believe you kept the comments off of the ads. You must be crazy, or you must be really brave.” And what we would do is we’d cut through and say, look, all joking aside, we really do honestly care about what you’re saying. We want to improve our product. So I’m here to hear you out and listen to you and see what I can do.
And after about 12 hours, we ended up having 4,000 or 5,000 positive karma on the account, even though there was a massive effort across all of Reddit to get us the lowest karma possible. So everybody was trying to downvote the account, but then people were coming to our defense. They were editing their comments. They were saying, this is really weird, I kind of like TikTok right now. I was like, what have you guys done to me? And by the end of the campaign, I had messages coming in with people saying, look, try this, if you could change this. And they were giving us advice on how we could improve our product on a regular basis.
In the end, we had multiple awards on the account and on the ads, which was the first time ever seeing a company ad get awards. We had posts, I think 30 or 40 posts across all of Reddit, including on the front page. Media was picking up on it. It was massive success as far as views and visibility. And it really turned the tide for the brand on Reddit to just put a human face, even though it’s not a real human there. It was like a human element to a brand softens the blow.
And so a lot of times people are nervous about the negativity or some of the problems that you can have on Reddit. But what I’d say is it’s only going to get better If you take the time to go in and engage with people. An old friend of mine, Jay Baer, once said in one of his books when he was talking about customer service, that only 5% of people who are upset will complain. So you have to assume that there’s still another 95% of the people who had the complaint that didn’t say anything. And I think that when you think about that, people just really genuinely want to be heard. And being present and being a part of the conversation makes people feel heard.
Rich: I want to be respectful of your time, but you opened up a can of worms that I just want your quick take on, because I feel like this is a whole other episode. But advertising on Reddit, up until now we’ve talked about just organic uses of Reddit. But I am curious to know any overall thoughts you might have on is Reddit a good platform to advertise on, even if you’re a small to medium sized business.
Brent: I would say absolutely. And Reddit posts case studies on their site and they have for a long time. There was one Canadian town, I think, back in the day that was doing a small little festival. And they were hoping to sell 50 tickets, and they ended up selling 200, in a small, like you said, main, subreddit where they just really posted small.
There was a guy, I love this example, and I just shared it with a friend of mine, Brandon, the other day on in a conversation on LinkedIn. But it was a guy who there was a question that was like, why is beef jerky so damn expensive? And he went in and explained, it’s because it’s steak, right? And it’s shrunk down and you’re paying for it. So how do you know all this? He said, my family runs a beef jerky company. And they were like, discount code? He’s like, absolutely. So he posted a new post with a discount code. And then they were like, you should do an AMA, people should know about this.
AMA is an ‘ask me anything’, it’s one of the largest ones. It’s what President Obama did back in the day, and Bill Gates. So he did an AMA. And then they said, we want to know how it all did. So we did a four post that had all the stats, and he did almost $30,000 in sales within a matter of two weeks as just a user on Reddit. So there are a lot of opportunities to run ads. I’ve seen a lot of really creative ads done.
There was one where I think it was Amazon, and Toyota did a deal where they shipped the first Toyota car across the country in an Amazon box. And then they got the pictures, and it went on Reddit. So then they ran ads on Reddit to accommodate that. Marriott did a virtual reality campaign and they did a bunch of stuff. So there’s been a lot of really fun campaigns. But the real reality is any ad campaign will work on Reddit if the ad campaign speaks to the people on Reddit. If it surfaces a problem, then solution, right? If it serves that audience, then the campaign can do well.
Now, I used to have a really different view on ads in the past. A lot of people don’t know this, but San Francisco is where the coding side of Reddit is. When they started doing ads and wanted to do better with ads, build a platform… because very early on, it was just pay auction, you just got ads. There was almost no tracking. It never matched up. They hired a New York agency to handle that, and they grew their business in New York to be the ad side. The ad side and the code side did not talk, did not get along. We would do campaigns that would get banned and then they’d be unbanned. And then I would say, look, how am I supposed to explain to these brands that they can’t really trust doing ads on Reddit because you’re getting all these conflicting messages from the company.
Now, a lot has changed since they’ve IPO’d over the last 10 years. I know quite a few of the guys and women on the ads team at Reddit today, and they’re much more focused on creating a very customized, a very good ad experience. I will still say, in my opinion, every ad you run in a subreddit should be geared for that subreddit. Because regardless of whether you can run an ad someplace, if it goes against the rules of that subreddit, they’re not going to respect that ad and they’re not going to respect your brand there. So I would say it still takes a bit of strategy when we work with ads with our clients.
I typically pull in the team at Reddit and have them work on it with us because they know all the nuances of the subreddits. They have different numbers that they can see on their side. And so normally we figure that out, but I think the ads works great if you know how to use it and if you know how to do it.
Rich: Awesome. This has been amazing, Brent. I am so appreciative of the time you spent with us today. If people want to learn more about you, where can we send them online?
Brent: Absolutely. Right now I’ve been on LinkedIn a lot and it’s just Brent Csutoras, LinkedIn Brent Csutoras. That’s where I’m mostly talking. I’ve never really been big at keeping an online presence. I’ve always worked more word of mouth, worked through referrals and things like that. But definitely LinkedIn is a great place to find me. That’s probably the only place right now that you could see me posting.
I really don’t do much on Instagram, Twitter, or anything else. And brentcsutoras.com is my email, and you’re always welcome to reach out. I’ll always start by seeing if it’s a good fit, if I can help you or not. And if I can, the conversation goes further. If I can’t help you, then I’ll send you to somebody maybe who can, or give you a little advice.
Rich: Awesome. And I will say that you were incredibly responsive. Because I saw your article in the Search Engine Journal, I reached out to you on LinkedIn, and moments later we were connected chatting. We’ll have all of your links in the show notes. And Brent, just again, thank you so much today.
Brent: It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Show Notes:
Brent Csutoras is a Reddit marketing strategist that proves brands can amplify their presence and drive impactful campaigns using this underutilized platform. Be sure to follow him on LinkedIn for actionable tips and strategy to take your Reddit game further.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.