How to Use Reddit to Grow Your Online Presence in 2024

• Aug 5 2024
• by Ilona K.

Finding new growth hacks for building your online presence is crucial for any business, especially for small enterprises. Reddit, a forum-like social media, is often overlooked when developing a strategy for your website. Get ahead of the curve and discover ways to use Reddit to grow your brand online with it.com Domains.

Reddit, the self-proclaimed “front page of the internet,” has evolved into a powerful platform for businesses seeking to expand their online reach. With millions of active users across a vast array of communities (subreddits), Reddit offers a unique opportunity to connect with your target audience by demonstrating your first-hand subject matter expertise. Let’s explore how to leverage Reddit to boost your online presence in 2024.

A Goldmine for Organic Growth

Reddit’s influence continues to grow. In 2024, it boasts over half a billion accounts and nearly 5.5 billion visits a month, making it one of the most visited websites globally. This audience is highly engaged, with users spending an average 12 minutes per visit on the platform.

An expanded partnership with Google, giving the latter an access to Reddit’s Data API, enhances Google’s product search results with real-time content from Reddit’s platform. A new analysis also suggests that Reddit shows up 97.5% of the time in Google Search product review queries and accounts for nearly two-thirds of the slots reserved for Google’s Discussions and forums SERP feature. 

Additionally, Reddit has recently strengthened its ties with OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT chatbot and a new SearchGPT search engine prototype. Which means that the content from Reddit threads becomes a source of training data for generative AI search – and a source of answers about your brand for your audience. 

This presents exciting opportunities for businesses to tap into the platform’s potential to showcase their products and services to an engaged audience.

Understanding Reddit Culture: Key to Success

Before diving into growing your presence on Reddit, it’s crucial to grasp the platform’s unique culture. Redditors value authenticity, transparency, and genuine engagement. Avoid blatant self-promotion, as it’s likely to be met with negative reactions. Instead, focus on providing value, and participating in discussions as a genuine community member.

Here are some tips on building your brand on Reddit. For this exercise, we’ll assume we are building an AI startup offering development of Autonomous AI agents – by the way, autonomousai.it.com domain name is available on .it.com for $49 per year (availability and price current at the time of the publication).

First and foremost – create a branded profile, ideally with your brand on it. Then link your profile from your website and other social media to showcase it’s fully legit. Now it’s time to deep dive into the platform. 

Find Your Audience on Reddit

• Identify Relevant Subreddits: Research and subscribe to subreddits aligned with your brand, services and your target audience’s interests. Use Reddit’s search function and explore popular communities within your niche. For our case, r/artificial and r/artificialintelligence seem to be a place to start – but there are hundreds of subreddits on the topic, like a smaller r/Autonomous_AI. 
• Understand Subreddit Rules: Each subreddit has its own set of rules and guidelines. Familiarize yourself with these rules before participating to avoid getting your comments removed or banned. For example, r/artificialintelligence has a rule where accounts newer than a day or users with less than 100 karma (internal indicator of activity on the platform) cannot post. They can post comments but not submit actual posts.
• Listen and Learn: Spend time observing conversations and understanding the community’s tone and preferences. This will help you tailor your content and engagement style accordingly.

Create Engaging Content

• Share Valuable Information: Offer helpful tips, insights, or resources related to your industry. Helpful advice will drive more upvotes, which in turn is a good signal for your brand profile on the platform. Create content that addresses common questions or pain points – for example, you could have shared your take on the news about Microsoft’s new Copilot AI Agents, announced at this year’s Build conference.
• Tell Stories: People connect with stories – share your business’s journey, customer success stories, or behind-the-scenes glimpses.
• Use High-Quality Visuals: Images and videos can significantly enhance your content’s appeal. Use eye-catching visuals that complement your message.
• Optimize your content for Reddit: Use clear and concise titles, and format your text for easy readability. Consider adding relevant flair or tags to increase visibility. Remember – Reddit content is increasingly being shown on Google, so using your experience with traditional SEO to optimize content for Google search will also help. 

Incorporate Links Naturally

One of the biggest challenges when using Reddit is finding ways to organically include links to your website. Self-promo is never well received on discussion boards – however, on Reddit you can often come across brands and products, including links to websites, which are tolerated if they add value to a discussion. 

• Provide Value First: Always prioritize offering valuable content and engaging with the community. Although links from Reddit are a good signal for Google to prioritize your website in search, those links should be seen as a bonus, not the main goal.
• Link to Relevant Resources: If you’ve mentioned a specific tool, statistic, or in-depth guide on your website, share the link to provide additional context. 
• Use Link Shorteners: While not always ideal, link shorteners can make your URLs more visually appealing and easier to share.
• Create Shareable Content: Develop content that is naturally linkable, such as infographics, case studies, or how-to guides. As an idea, this could be your recent case study of creating an autonomous AI agent for a business, or a link to GitHub with useful code snippets, or a video.

Build Relationships and Engagement

• Participate in Discussions: Naturally engage with other users by commenting on posts, answering questions, and sharing your expertise where you can add value. Remember – your ‘karma’, or simply reputation on Reddit and ability to post on certain communities depends on the number of upvotes and downvotes on your posts and comments. 
• Respond to Feedback: Monitor your posts and comments for feedback, and address concerns promptly and professionally. Reddit is a very human-first platform and the community members appreciate a human touch. 
• Leverage User-Generated Content: Encourage users to share their experiences with your brand. If you receive positive feedback, share it to build trust and credibility.

Measure and Optimize Your Reddit Efforts

• Track Key Metrics: Monitor metrics like brand mentions, upvotes, comments, and referral website traffic to measure the impact of your Reddit activities. On Google Analytics 4, traffic from Reddit can be found under Referrals. If you are after a quick boost, consider exploring Reddit Ads to promote specific offers or reach a wider audience at key growth points. 
• Analyze Competitor Performance: Study how competitors are using Reddit to identify opportunities and areas for improvement. As on any social platform, you will notice that Reddit has its own influencers – finding and collaborating with the ones relevant to your brand can be a powerful way to overtake competitors.
• Experiment and Iterate: Continuously test different approaches and content formats to refine your strategy. 

Using Reddit as a business is not easy and requires a comprehensive content strategy. However, by consistently providing value to the Reddit community, you can effectively grow your online presence and drive traffic to your website. 

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