The Reddit Submission Guide was originally created for the Ghost Influence (community) community.
Introduction
For the marketers living under a rock (aka Facebook), Reddit is a democratic social platform where users vote on all content submitted to any of its 11,288 active communities. In February of 2016, Reddit’s 231 million unique visitors generated over 8.2 billion pageviews each month. Content that gains traction on Reddit carries a great deal of influence with major publishers from CNN to Buzzfeed who regularly scrape the platform for various forms of stories and content.
Unlike Brand Platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) where users develop an audience around their voice, engagement on Community Platforms (Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt, etc.) centers around the idea of democracy. Anyone is able to join, engage, and submit to a community. The spread of content, resulting from positive ‘upvotes’, is directly correlated to the voice and values of the community (aka ‘subreddit’) to which it has been submitted.
Reddit is the front page of the Internet — success often results in a chain reaction.
This environment of democracy results in a deeper connection to the content and conversation as those engaging it see it as a part of their community. One thousand shares of a blog post to Facebook and one thousand upvotes on Reddit will produce a radically different outcome.
While there are a menagerie of Reddit case studies available on the web, the majority are high-level guides and often illustrate the highly relative nature of their insights. The obvious reason for this is the relative nature of the platform — each subreddits has a distinctly different way of communicating and measuring value. The framework for success is largely dependant on your content (both context and relative quality), the subreddit relevancy of the voice in which it’s submitted, and your ability to speak as a member of the community you’re engaging. This document combines three data science experiments where Reddit was scraped, analyzed, and deconstructed to then create a guided checklist. With this document, you will be able to assess and modify your content, research the landscape of the community, and create the best conditions possible for an effective submission. This is a framework for evaluation and action.
Guide
—leverage the appropriate medium
Images have a far greater likelihood of garnering upvotes than text posts, but text posts foster more conversations in the comments and stay on the front page longer. The best medium is one that is contextually appropriate for the content being submitted. An artist displaying their work and an influencer sharing their voice might choose to submit an image as their primary goal will most likely be impressions that generate exposure. Alternatively, an entrepreneur forging new connections by sharing their story or a soon to be discovered script writer will opt for a text post as their goal will likely be the conversations and relationships surrounding their submission.
When choosing the medium it’s important to factor context and objective into your decision.
When submitting posts focused around large volumes of text you will have two options: you can make a text post whereby you write within Reddit’s text editor and insert external links where relevant or you can submit a ‘link post’ that will take the user directly to an external page.
The average lifetime of a text (self) post is 5 hours and 15 minutes.
The average lifetime of an external post is only 3 hours and 45 minutes.
Text posts, natively hosted on Reddit, are more likely to be read through to completion and last longer in the rankings. However, readers who click the links within a text post spend less time on the sites and have a higher bounce rate than those driven through a link post. These results will vary depending on the language structure of the content, but generally speaking a link posts are better for (passively) driving actions like email signups, contact requests, etc.
Editor’s Note: Never hard sell or force your message, even once someone has left Reddit’s platform. Websites of any form will perform better when submitted to Reddit when calls-to-action (email optins, links to sales pages, advertising, etc.) is overwhelmingly passive or non-existent.
Said simply, actions taken occur on the platform where the content is consumed.
Use these guidelines to match your objectives with the appropriate medium:
use a photo post when seeking — impressions, exposure, awareness, etc.
use a text post when seeking — engagement, connections, relationships, etc.
use a link post when seeking — email signups, contact requests, social shares, etc.
—submit to the most appropriate subreddit
Submission of content is done through subreddits, each of which has a distinct voice. In order to understand these voices it’s important to look for common elements of successful posts. Sort any subreddit by ‘top’ (month, year, or all time) to assess the differences in tone and language. The most successful submissions in subreddits like /r/gadgets and /r/worldnews use a distinctly logical voice that communicates an analytical description of the content being submitted. Alternatively, successful posts on subreddits like /r/funny and /r/tinder are more likely to use emotionally charged headlines that serve as a basis for the story within the submission.
95% of submission to Reddit is research.
Subreddits /r/funny, /r/pics, /r/gifs, /r/todayilearned, /r/gaming dominate the Reddit's front page. With binary content that easily digested, posts from these subreddits get bigger scores, higher ranks, and are most frequently present in the top 25 of Reddit. While these are statistically more likely to gain traction, they have more subscribers generating more submissions and create more competition for upvotes. In contrast, smaller subreddits have less competition and enable submissions that are more relevant to the interests and voice of the community. Posts that succeed on smaller communities are often cross posted (aka ‘xpost’) to larger subreddits. Focus on relevant engagement as it will always be more meaningful to your submission objective.
identify the appropriate subreddit for the content being submitted
focus on smaller subreddits (5K+ subscribers) to increase relevancy
use the ‘top’ submissions to evaluate the voice of the community
—make strategic investments
While investigating the voice of your intended subreddit it’s also important to look at the quality, or lackthereof, of successful submissions. In the same way the most successful submissions will speak your version of the community’s voice, you will need to frame your content to fit as well. Subreddits like /r/internetisbeautiful value the voice of a creator (self-promotion) when the content being submitted is built and/or designed with exceptional care while subreddits like /r/funny do not allow self-promotion (see rules) and are less likely to upvote professionally taken photos. Not all content will be able to be ‘framed’ for submission to Reddit, but this process will also enable you to investigate content ideas and validate the investment into their creation.
Successful leverage of Reddit is not a quantity game — it’s a quality game. A single submission to a community of 48,000 can outrank the community’s top submission of all time by 1,520%, be cross posted to /r/bestof, drive 1M visitors to a newly launched blog, generate 38K backlinks, create (estimated) 25M earned media impressions, while fostering countless offers for partnership and consulting over the two years following its submission. Do not underestimate the value of investing into content that provides unique and relevant value in interesting ways.
Start with an idea, find a subreddit that might be interested, research to validate the idea, draw insights from successful submissions to guide the development, and over deliver value.
research submission ideas before investing the time and money to produce them
use your research to educate the development of more effective content
—create a binary response
The average lifetime of text posts with a positive headline is significantly longer than the lifetime of posts with a neutral or negative headline. For text posts, very positive or very negative posts perform significantly better than neutral ones. With any type of submission to Reddit — text, images, videos, and external links — it’s extremely important to frame the content and message in a manner that is easily digested by the audience of the subreddit you’re engaging.
“A very successful Reddit post is mostly, not always, but mostly one that is easy to understand and aligns with the expectations of its intended audience.” ~ Mike Rugnetta, Idea Channel
create a message in a native voice that evokes a binary response
—post at an optimum time
While each subreddit’s distinct community speaks with the same voice it’s also been shown to operate by the same schedule. In January of 2006 Ramiro Gómez, a Berlin based software developer, created the Reddit Popular Post Times Explorer. Having evaluated over 215 million posts to Reddit, submissions that reached a score of one thousand points or higher were extracted and grouped by subreddit, day of the week, and hour of the day to show what times are the most likely for submitting a successful post. His tool enables you to explore when the top scoring submissions, for 475 subreddits, where posted in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
Data Stories, another source cited for this checklist, applied machine learning to analyze 4.6 million data points collected by scraping the front page of Reddit for 22 days. Unlike Gómez who broke apart the date based on subreddit, their findings for the optimum time to submit to Reddit as a whole shows a distinct pattern — the fastest time for getting upvotes starts at 9AM PST.
(credit: data stories)
look up your intended subreddit in the explorer to find the optimum time for submission
if not included in the explorer, make your submission between 9AM and 1PM PST
—follow each subreddit’s rules
While Reddit’s user agreement details the platform’s terms of use, each subreddit has different rules listed in the right sidebar. Rules commonly listed rules restrict gore, nsfw, bullying, and topics non-relevant to the community. Other rules will restrict the types and format of content allowed for submission. The rules are set, and consistently modified, by community moderators.
Subreddits like /r/startups ban self-promotion stating ‘We are a community of discussion, not a marketing channel. No promotional posts’ while /r/shutupandtakemymoney requires ‘CREATOR flair (method of tagging) on your own products’ and /r/promote exists specifically for you to ‘promote anything that you wish!’ Each subreddit has a difference stance on the same topic.
One of the most eloquent (and subjective) rules from /r/gifs: “Bot and low-effort novelty accounts that do not constructively contribute content or add to discussion (e.g., trolling, counting, modifying parent comments, correcting someone's grammar, etc.) are not allowed on /r/gifs.”
One of the most odd rules from /r/tifu (Today I Fucked Up) reads: Bodily discharge & sexual content posts will be removed unless it's the weekend. Overly vulgar posts will still be removed.
Rules are determined by the moderators of each subreddit, subject to their interpretation, and change at their discretion. Violation of a subreddit’s rules can result in anything from the removal of your post to the permanent banning of your account. Read the rules before submitting, even if you’ve submitted there successfully multiple times — read the fucking rules.
read the rules of the subreddit every time you got to submit — regardless of familiarity
Conclusion
There isn’t a universal formula to leverage Reddit’s communities for marketing, but there is a plethora of data displaying a clear framework. Through a combination of research and strategy you will be able to make strategic investments and embed yourself, and your brand, within.
If you want to create leverage and develop your story, become a member of Ghost Influence — the guided chat group for marketing on Community Platforms like Reddit. Tap the experience, both triumphs and failures, of those who have effectively utilized this framework.
The benefits and leverage of Reddit marketing are huge, but only if you play by the rules.
About
Brian Swichkow, Founder of Ghost Influence, is a Reddit-obsessed social engineer that’s oddly infamous for pranking his roommate with eerily targeted Facebook Ads. Since then, he’s created and launched an ecommerce store that garnered 156K pageviews in the first 24 hours, a software project that pulled 11K pageviews and 563 email signups in the first 30 minutes, and everything in between. When not coaching inside Ghost Influence or interviewing people on The Ghost Influence Podcast, he’s developing user acquisition strategies for startups.
See also
References
Tags
#reddit-guide (See:
#index (See: #index)