Reddit: my DOs and DONTs for marketing
My take on Reddit as a marketing platform after countless hours browsing it and promoting my digital products and services
I’ve started spending time on Reddit around 4 years ago. First seeking for answers regarding technical challenges I had at that time, and then it slowly became my daily routine. I basically use it as a social media, a source of news and trends. And when you spend on Reddit enough time you start seeing patterns, what works and what does not.
Reddit is a very different beast when it comes to marketing. It’s well known for its zero tolerance for direct marketing. There is an absolute zero chance that you post a text explaining how nice your product is, attach the link to it and get positive feedback and upvotes. At least, I haven’t seen this and it never worked for me. Instead, you’ll be either immediately banned as a spam or heavily downvoted with lots of sarcasm and negativity in the comments section. It’s just how it works. Reddit community hates BS and direct promotions.
So how to navigate Reddit as a marketer? The truth is that I still learn it. It’s tricky but it’s definitely possible to get some quality links and traffic from this platform. Let’s explore some things that I try to avoid and things I do for marketing my products and services.
DONTs (feel free to try tho)
Never attach the link to the product/service you talk about in the post. From what I see it’s the reason number one to get automatically flagged as a spam, so the post rarely passes moderation and get published.
Avoid talking about the product itself as much as possible. Focus on a problem you face and try to solve, explain what you tried already and why it didn’t work.
Don’t try to compete and outsmart the community. And don’t take it too seriously.
DOs (can work for you also)
Earn your karma. Many subreddits require you to have a certain amount of karma before you can comment/post on them. Start with interacting with all sorts of subreddits you like - post, comment, engage. It will bring you karma in case your posts/comments are upvoted. But remember, on a flip side, the downvotes cause damage to your karma.
Ask questions. This is probably the most powerful thing on Reddit. Be specific and concrete when articulating your requests, and you can get incredibly useful feedback on the topic. If it’s related to your product and you see people in comments struggle with that problem also, it may be the right moment to drop them a link in comments or DMs.
Stay a human and write text by yourself. I saw too many blames in the comments that the post is written by AI. And they have a point. I think Reddit is not the right place to write beautiful AI-generated text. It appreciates authentic and raw content.
Did the marketing on Reddit work for me?
I take it similarly to SEO meaning that the effects are often not immediately visible. But some comments stick, get visible and the posts might be indexed well by search engines. I keep getting traffic from Reddit comments that I published a couple of years ago. Again, it’s similar with old good SEO - some things work, others don’t. But in general, I think it’s definitely worth trying. It also might be a good way to get crawled by LLMs and show up in the AI output ultimately.
Bonus
Regarding the tools for marketing on Reddit. I’ve seen many of them and tried a few. I didn’t see much value from using them (even for free), apart from one tool that’s I’d like to share with you. It’s a free tool called F5Bot.
The idea is simple - track interesting/niche keywords or your brand mentioning, so you can quickly react on that. First replies tend to stick and show up better.
These are my takeaways from using Reddit as a user and a founder/marketer. What is your experience on Reddit? Share it in the comments, I’m genuinely curious to hear it!
Till the next one!