Reddit - the self-proclaimed 'front page of the internet' - is often over-looked in the social media marketing space, with most choosing to focus their efforts on the more 'consumer-friendly' platforms. And while the hesitance around Reddit is somewhat justified (the platform has notoriously low tolerance levels for overly promotional content), there are significant opportunities in the Reddit community, both for marketing and listening in to your target audience to learn more about their needs and interests.
Consider this - Reddit claims to be the seventh largest website in the U.S., and sees 234 million monthly active users. For comparison, Twitter has 319 million MAU, while Pinterest has 150 million. Reddit also serves 8 billion monthly page views, and the average Redditor spends around 13 minutes on the platform per session.
Those are some intriguing numbers - and combined with the platform's efforts to make itself more brand friendly, it's definitely worth a look.
And today, Reddit has announced another measure which may eventually provide value for brands, with the introduction of Twitter-style user profiles that give Reddit users an opportunity to better showcase their combined platform efforts.
As you can see in the above example, the new Reddit profiles provide links to each users' Reddit activity, including communities they're active in and posts.
Reddit told TechCrunch that the new profiles were inspired by a need to improve discovery on the platform and help popular Redditors build an audience.
"We're making this change because content creators tell us they have a hard time finding the right place to post their content. We also want to support them in being able to grow their own followers (similar to how communities can build subscribers)."
For brands, this could obviously prove valuable, as it would give them a home on the platform to refer users to (complete with background image and bio for branding), helping them build a more targeted audience for their updates.
But the profiles aren't available to business as yet - in fact, they're not available to many people at all, Reddit's chosen a "handful of Redditors" to test the feature, though they have given access to one brand, in Riot Games, the makers of 'League of Legends'
In the notes accompanying the announcement, Reddit explains that Riot was chosen "because of how well they participate in r/LeagueOfLegends and their demonstrated understanding of how we expect companies to engage on Reddit". And that understanding is important - Reddit's known for its authenticity, for facilitating genuine conversations and discussion free of marketing spin. If you want to succeed with the Reddit community, you have to invest the time to get to know them.
As noted, Reddit has slowly been making changes to evolve their platform, with this latest addition being another step towards generating more engagement and opening the platform up to increased opportunity. Providing brands with their own profiles would be another step, giving them a reference point to link back to user questions they've answered on the platform, AMA threads - basically providing a branded focal point for their Reddit efforts.
But even if you don't see the value of Reddit for your business, there's a heap of business-relevant questions being posed across the platform every day, so it is worth paying attention to, or at least tuning in every now and then.
Millions of conversations are being conducted there, and Reddit is, very often, where the biggest internet trends begin.
Ignoring it outright could mean leaving opportunity on the table.