Reddit has always been a force to be reckoned with online. A positive mention on Reddit can help your business increase its website traffic, sales, and brand recognition. As we saw earlier this year with its stock market conversations, knowing how to use Reddit can be lucrative and exciting. 

But as is the case with any form of social media marketing, your participation should be strategic. Reddit has over 300 million active users, more than Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, or Pinterest. Social media marketers might not emphasize Reddit as much as platforms with fewer active users, but that does not mean you have to follow their lead. Knowing how to use Reddit to your business's advantage will undoubtedly help you broaden your organization's audience and identify new growth opportunities. 

If you are looking to harness the perks of Reddit marketing for your business, you are in luck. Here are some strategies to successfully navigate Reddit's vibrant community.

Perk #1: Reddit can help you identify relevant trends. 

Before you start using Reddit to identify relevant trends, it is essential to understand the platform's demographics. The typical Reddit user is a male between the ages of 25 and 44. Most users come from the United States and hail from west coast cities like San Francisco and Seattle. 

Even if you do not have a great deal of time to devote to Reddit, you can still use the platform for market research. One way to use Reddit to identify relevant trends is through subreddits. Subreddits are topical threads within the website that focus on a specific subject matter. There are hundreds of thousands of subreddits for you to choose from; the more you can actively participate in, the better. 

As always with Reddit, it is more worthwhile to actively participate in a few subreddits than to passively contribute based on self-promotion to every subreddit that meets your credentials. If you log on to Reddit and search for topics of interest, the search results will point you in the direction of like-minded subreddits. Third-party tools, such as Redditlist, are also helpful for locating active subreddits.

Perk #2: Reddit helps you connect with like-minded people.

Beyond subreddits, you can also use Reddit to connect with like-minded people by tracking searches. Set a reminder to run a manual search on brand mentions to see if and what users are saying about your business. Staying on top of your brand mentions helps when seeking honest feedback and discussion. If you choose to respond to a specific mention, pay attention to the context before you reply. Users are likely to respond positively to sincere remarks.

Perk #3: Using Reddit correctly can increase your website traffic. 

Increasing your website traffic with Reddit will not work if you show up only to promote your brand. If you want to use Reddit to draw users to your website, then you need to actively contribute to the community. Actively contributing to the Reddit community can include saving a handful of subreddits and responding to posts within them regularly. 

Successful Reddit users typically have plenty of karma points. Karma points are a function of your profile, and you earn them every time you share links and leave comments. When someone upvotes your Reddit content, you receive an increase in karma points, and when someone downvotes your content, your Karma points decrease. To build up your karma points, start by getting involved in popular subreddits such as, but not limited to, r/today-I-learned and r/Ask-Reddit. Since the content in these subreddits is less niche and more open-ended, it is easy to get involved quickly.

Although karma points do not affect whether your content goes viral, they impact how other users view your presence on Reddit. The more karma points you have, the more sincere other other users will likely find you. Without karma points, your content is likely to appear as self-serving and only interested in promoting your business. If users pick up that you are only on Reddit to promote your business, they will likely feel discouraged from engaging with your content due to its inauthenticity. 

About Krishen Iyer

Krishen Iyer is a marketing and contracting expert from the Southern California area. A graduate of San Diego State University, Krishen is the founder of MAIS Consulting. The consulting firm, which is approaching its first anniversary, collaborates with organizations to identify gaps in their growth and brainstorm strategies for improvement. In his free time, Krishen enjoys playing golf, and he is also an avid soccer fan who both watches and plays the sport.