Long Term Success with Reddit #Pubcon Liveblog

How much do you know about Reddit, and are you using it the right way to build your online presence? Brent Csutoras, social media strategist and content marketer, takes center stage at Pubcon Las Vegas to help you not only understand Reddit but also learn how to achieve long-term success on the site.

Moderator: Stoney deGeyter, President, Pole Position Marketing (@StoneyD)

Speaker: Brent Csutoras, Social Media Strategist, Kairay Media (@brentcsutoras)

Reddit: The Catalyst for What’s Popular Online

Reddit is one of the aggregate sites that still consistently grows. Digg grew, crashed, and died. You can count the social aggregator sites that tried and failed. One of the largest social networks, Reddit never makes an effort to grow or to sell you on their site. They’re a massive community built of influencers — people likely to make a topic viral.

While it’s a huge community, it’s very misunderstood by businesses. There are 100 million U.S. visitors that are educated, influential spenders.

Understanding Reddit

Reddit is a platform. It’s a software solution. It’s not one community. Anyone can create their own community and can make their own rules. There’s no standard from one community to another. Think of it as being like WordPress or Tumblr. You start as a user, but if you create a subreddit you will be a moderator. Moderators can also be assigned by other moderators. Admins actually work for Reddit. They don’t get involved in subreddits unless they are violating an overall site rule.

Reddit’s front page is an aggregate of the subreddits that you’ve subscribed to. If you’re not logged in, then the front page is the 40 most popular subreddits. The algorithm is a logarithmic voting algorithm. The first 10 votes that happen on a post are equal to the next 100, and those are equal to the next 1,000.

Be anonymous. That’s how it’s done on Reddit. If everyone’s anonymous on Reddit, then you should be, too.

Become a redditor. Social is the place you should be marketing. Create content specifically for Reddit. Understand the lingo used by redditors (members/users), such as x-post (short for cross-post), FTFY (fixed that for you), and TL;DR (too long; didn’t read).

If you’re in the space, you care about learning, and you’ll actually get into Reddit because there’s no better place to find out more about how things are progressing in marketing. It’s more than a community. It’s generally a great tool.

Comment before submitting. There’s no rule for how long you should wait to submit before you comment. Commenting is where the emphasis is on Reddit. Comment on upcoming stories. Look at posts that are rising and find ones with only one or two comments where you can add some thought.

Find your passion in subreddits. Check those areas every day, because then you can have something to say quickly and authoritatively. This helps you become a better redditor and helps your profile, success and understanding.

Submitting on Reddit

Understand the difference between a large community and an active community. Total count of subscribed users is not as valuable as how many users are here now. Check Redditmetrics.com. Identify subreddits that are targeted and have high activity levels.

Read the community rules every time you submit because they change. They don’t care if you don’t know and they’ll ban you, and you may be silent banned and not even know it. Read the rules so you can tell if they preclude you from doing your ultimate goal, submitting links, for instance. Why waste your time somewhere if you can’t do what you want to do?

Make friends with moderators. Review the moderators and identify their interests. Look at RedditInvestigator.com to research moderators and see what they submit. Find content that matches the content that they submit. It’ll come up to their attention that you are in line with their interests. This is a great way to get past an initial moderation requirement so your submissions are automatically approved.

Research. Do a domain search (site:) for what is already working. In the subreddit, research the top and controversial posts. Submit at the right time — 10 a.m. EST, or whenever the right moderators are active. After 24 hours, the Reddit algorithm strongly devalues the content.

Don’t spam Reddit. It doesn’t work. It’s not worth your time. What does spam mean?

Reddit.com/r/spam — List of suspected spammer accounts. Spend a couple hours there and you’ll see the patterns redditors use as spam. You can also set an alert to see if your name is mentioned there.

Reddit-focused content — Re-create popular concepts over six months old. You can do a remix/spin of popular content. Or you can resubmit the same content because sometimes there’s a video that you may have seen a few times but it’s cute and you like to watch it again.

Reddit Gold — You, influencers, moderators, you may want to be a Gold Partner. It’s a few dollars a month that can give your belonging an edge.

Reddit Ads — Look at his presentations online (SlideShare.net/BrentCsutoras/presentations).

AMAs — The AMA (Ask Me Anything) is one of the most popular things on Reddit. It’s an interview format, and AMA is one of the most popular subreddits. A favorite was an AMA with a vacuum repair guy; his AMA brought vacuum websites down with the traffic that he sent when curious people went to look.

Responding to comments: Related threads, Reddit exclusive offers, link to resources.

Things to Remember

• Reddit is filled with influencers, has a great demographic audience, and is growing regularly.
• Become a redditor and comment often.
• Find active subreddits with accommodating rules.
• Research what works.
• Marry the mods.
• Consider alternate avenues of marketing other than submissions.

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.