What Everyone Ought to Know About Reddit

When people hear the term “social media” typically, they think of the major social networking platforms (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.). However, there is one rapidly rising, highly influential social media platform that, although well known, is underutilized and often misunderstood – Reddit. All those cat memes you love? They started on Reddit. In fact, a lot of viral content on the Internet stems this site.

Reddit is a “social bookmarking” site where anonymous users can post interesting links, discussions, images, etc. and other users can vote them up or down. The voting feature essentially makes this website a user-regulated forum where spam and poor quality submissions get sent to the void and the submitter gets publicly shamed.

To illustrate the power of Reddit, view these traffic analytics graph and traffic stats images below of Maneesh Sethi’s blog after a link to his site was placed in the comments of a link submission:

These numbers resulted from a viral blog post on Maneesh where he hired someone on Craigslist to slap him when the Internet distracted him.

Numbers don’t lie – Reddit is no joke.  There are a number of celebrities that have accounts there including, but not limited to, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Gates, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Snoop Dogg. Even President Obama understands how influential this website is.

However, Reddit is truly a double-edged sword. For example, read this article on the Woody Harrelson AMA (ask me anything) disaster where the actor was clearly using Reddit as a place to promote his new movie “Rampart.” The “redditors” didn’t like this so much and decided to make “Scumbag Woody Harrelson” memes (a variation of the “Scumbag Steve” meme):

You don’t want people making memes like this about your brand? Don’t shove your product down their throats.

 See for yourself how impactful Reddit is on your online reputation:

We manage online reputation at Silverback Social for our clients, so we regularly engage with users on Reddit who seek help with social media by offering real, actionable tips and advice. In return, they are openly responsive to the links I post to Silverback’s blog and have given me great feedback on the content we produce.

Reddit is a community of people and they expect to be treated as such – not sheep that’ll blindly accept being advertised to. It’s about give and take — once you, as a brand, truly understand this concept, you can utilize sites like Reddit to their fullest potential.

Have you participated in the Reddit community?  Let us know about in the comments below.