5 Ways Brands Can Show Up Authentically on Reddit
How brands are breaking new ground on the 15-year-old campfire platform
On Reddit, community has always been king.
In the fifteen years since its inception, the OG digital campfire platform has evolved from a community-led encyclopedic platform (think: Wikipedia) to a community-led social platform. Today, it’s home to 130k-plus communities that attract some of the most highly-engaged audiences online—which makes it a gold mine for brands (not to mention entrepreneurs on the hunt for community-first business ideas).
I recently spoke with Will Cady, Reddit’s Head of Creative Strategy, who oversees the platform’s relationship with advertisers.
As Will sees it, we have experienced two big internet “waves,” and are about to experience a third. He identifies each by the primary entry point through which we navigate the Web. The first point of entry was search. The second was social media. And the third big wave—which we are moving into today—is community.
While our conversation focused on ways brands can authentically engage with—and elevate—the conversations people are already having about them on the platform, the 5 takeaways from our chat below are relevant to brands looking to show up on any community-led platform.
1. Understand what drives conversation and connection within a given community
A hallmark of Reddit communities (or subreddits), Will says, is that people are brought together by a key shared interest—for example, a curiosity about nootropics—but their backgrounds are very different. And often, it’s precisely that diversity of identity that drives and sustains the conversation. “People really love to exchange information on what they share in common from the vantage point of their differences,” he says.
Frequently, the dialogue revolves around sexual identity, location, or age (intergenerational dialogue is surprisingly common). In many communities, those differences are actually the source of connection. Case in point: subreddits such as Ask Men Over Thirty, PepTalksWithPops, and MomForAMinute, where you see a clear exchange of value. In these forums, for example, people who love the feeling of embodying a character (like an archetypical parent) and people who are seeking the presence of those archetypes in their lives (like someone who has lost a parent) can connect. And, as Will points out, that interplay flourishes despite anonymity on both sides. You might not know if the person on the other side of the screen is a sage septuagenarian or high schooler, but there is comfort in the exchange.
Anonymity in communities can also foster authentic sharing—something that’s unique to Reddit. In beauty subreddits such as Makeup Addiction, for example, that anonymity lends itself to vulnerability: People feel more comfortable being honest about their flaws and challenges when they’re not on display in front of everyone they know.
2. Learn to be an anthropologist-meets-marketer
Poking around any subreddit not only offers a valuable window into a community, but the search function can also be an incredible marketing tool. If you search a term and see a result that’s interesting, but don’t quite understand what it means, almost invariably you’ve found something a few months before it goes mainstream, says Will.
It’s also important to identify, understand, and leverage the knowledge of what Will calls “culture carriers” in the communities where you’re looking to engage. One way to do this is to pay attention to their language—and use it. When you do so, you’re tapping their influence, which can be useful even if you’re distributing your message beyond that specific community.
3. Find what only your brand can do, only on Reddit—and leverage the authority you have in a particular space
It’s always important to prioritize building trust before trying to initiate a transaction. But what’s unique to Reddit is that the platform’s users spend 4x as much time on their research sessions on their path to purchase as users on other platforms, and make purchase decisions nine times faster. So for marketers, Will says, being on Reddit is an incredible opportunity to meet people where they’re doing this research, and stepping in where they need actual expertise.
Will uses a recent partnership with Adobe as an example: “With Adobe, we’ve partnered throughout the year on a product purpose initiative, where we're putting the creative suite in front of the design communities and using some of the great amazing GIF-makers on Reddit to come up with those assets,” he says. “So every touch point on Reddit for Adobe is very, very Reddit in its own way.”
Just a few weeks ago, Reddit hosted an activation called Layer—an event for which the Adobe Photoshop toolkit was coded into the Reddit platform for people to use. The result? 85,000 new works of art created by Reddit users on the platform, and 56,000 new members to the Layer community.
4. Don’t underestimate the depth of engagement and conversation on Reddit
With the release of Unsolved Mysteries, Netflix sparked a cultural moment for the show by simply using a promoted post to link to a Google Drive folder, and loading the folder with case files for clues related to each episode. What followed, as Will put it, was that Reddit users had an absolute field day—both in the post comments section and in the organic community for Unsolved Mysteries. “It created a moment of excitement around the show because it created something that the community could sink its teeth into and talk about,” he says.
5. Remember the human
Humanity and humility lead to deeper engagement, says Will. Reddit believes this so strongly that “Remember the Human” is emblazoned on a wall at HQ in glowing letters. “The brand activations that work the best on Reddit are the ones that tap something very, very human in the experience,” Will says.
One clear example of this came at the beginning of quarantine, when Jimmy John’s found themselves without access to a designer. So they did what they could: They doodled something in paint and used it as their marketing asset. It was a very human response to an experience we were all having, Will says. And It became a trend: “During quarantine, other brands were making really what we would regard as low-quality, low-effort ad creative,” he says. “But it was coming from a place of humility, from a place of being very human and co-experiencing what we’re all going through in a way that was really very endearing.”
As with Jimmy John’s, the most successful partnerships, Will finds, are the ones where brands are willing to let Reddit users do what they do best: engage authentically.
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Want to hear more from Will? Check out our full hour-long conversation on The Digital Campfire Download here.
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