Reddit Advertising: Your Company's Secret Weapon

As we continue with our #LearnSocialMedia blog series, we're going to take a brief look at a less-talked-about site: Reddit.

If you don't know what Reddit is, chances are your teen, your husband or your brother knows about it. It's a pretty unique social media platform that's probably more of a forum congregate than social media.

I know what you're thinking: "Isn't Reddit that dangerous website where mean, hateful people gather?"

Reddit does have its fair share of controversy, yes, but it's safe to say that all social media sites have their dark corners. There are many parts of Reddit full of fun, friendly people who have many passions in life and want to share them with others! Those passionate people are the ones you want to focus on.

What's Reddit Like?

Unlike Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, where users have profile pictures displayed next to each of their posts, Reddit focuses mostly on posting. Posting with a fair amount of anonymity, too.

Most importantly, the culture of Reddit is much different. While Facebook and Twitter are more about sharing your life and personal views, and Instagram is more about sharing your experiences, Reddit is more about sharing everything.

Opinions - both popular and not - good and bad experiences, political views and other topics are welcome to be posted on Reddit. Discourse and social connection are the main focus, with each topic being separated into a community called a 'subreddit'. These are usually stylized as "r/topic" after the reddit url.

Why Should I Use Reddit?

Despite it not being as popular or talked-about as other social media sites, Reddit users are a huge market. A market that's oftentimes overloooked during a social media campaign. CNBC estimates an average 330 million monthly active users on Reddit, and SocialMediaToday says that Reddit has much higher engagement rates than sites like Twitter.

What's unique about Reddit is that communities are separated by interest. As some marketing gurus such as Nathan Shivar have pointed out, advertisers can promote their business directly to certain Redditors - just by going to the right subreddit!

This means that a bit of time and money is saved; time and money that might have been spent figuring out the right demographics, putting together a buyer persona and advertising to mass audiences through other avenues.

How do I Promote my Business on Reddit?

Reddit offers promoted posts. This means that you pay for your content to be shown to users of a certain Reddit community.

As Shivar's article goes on to say, you're charged by CPM. That's basically cost-per-mile or cost for every thousand views. Reddit has a basic set of rules and FAQs for advertising, but they're pretty simple to follow.

The main challenge is just finding the right subreddit to promote on. The more focused the topic of the subreddit is, and the more useful and interesting your business is to those users, the higher a chance your advert has of getting clicks.

Shivar's article also points out that there are many related subreddits. If you want to promote to people passionate about fashion, there are multiple subreddits for that! You have r/fashion, but you also have r/streetwear, r/femalefashionadvice, and r/malefashionadvice, among many more! Then there's, of course, the fashion-adjacent subreddits such as r/ProjectRunway, r/makeupaddiction... you get the idea.

Once you have your subreddit selected, it's only a matter of setting up your account, picking your campaign, and putting in billing info. You'll then be billed on a recurring basis, or until you reach your budget cap.

Ads also have to be approved before they're run. This is usually done within 24 hours, so long as they're grammatically correct, all words are spelled correctly and capitalized properly, and link to a live url.

So you see why Reddit is worth advertising on! You'd be tapping into very concentrated markets, saving you the effort of figuring out your target audience.

Hopefully your appetite has been whetted enough to look more into advertising on Reddit. Good luck, and happy advertising!