Reddit has a massive user base with roughly 500 million members, most of which are aged 18 to 29 years old. So, if your brand is interested in attracting a young demographic online, Reddit is the place to go.
In this guide, we will be looking at how to create a community on Reddit and, most importantly, how to build it into a viable advertising resource. It’s not just about using Reddit properly, but also about incorporating it into your overall marketing strategy.
Below, you can also learn more about how KeyMentions can help you build a Reddit community. KeyMentions is a high-quality social listening tool that lets you set email alerts based on keywords, brand mentions, and the number of upvotes and comments.
What is a Reddit Community?
Reddit communities are Reddit sub-pages that explore a specific topic. Everybody can get involved in a Reddit community by posting threads, commenting, and voting on comments. Moreover, Reddit communities are always created by real website users such as yourself.
Examples of popular Reddit communities include r/Music (for music discussions) and r/Movies (for film discussions), but also highly specified communities revolving around stuff as weird as photos of eggs in strange places (believe it or not, they have 62K members!).
A Reddit community is often called a Subreddit, but the two aren’t exactly the same. All Reddit communities start as Subreddits, but they only develop into real communities once they have a decent number of steady, active members.
How To Create a Reddit Community
While building a real Reddit community can be a challenging and time-consuming process, creating one is fairly easy. The biggest difficulty is to identify a topic that still doesn’t exist on Reddit, as duplicated communities tend to get slashed by moderators early on.
To start, you just need to press the [Create a community] button, on the left sidebar of the website. Then, fill out the following basic information:
| Community name | The community name is unchangeable, so make sure to get it right from the get-go. Avoid spaces, keep it under 21 characters, and make sure it’s a unique name that describes your community as accurately as possible. |
| Topics | Use the drop-down menu to select your community’s primary and secondary topics. Getting these tags right is crucial because they can help users find your community organically. |
| Description | A short written summary of what the community is all about. Try to keep it concise and fun, as Redditors value laidback content that goes straight to the point. |
| Community type | Choose between (1) Public (anyone can view and post), (2) Restricted (anyone can view, but only approved members can post), and (3) Private (only approved members can view and post). |
| Adult content | If your community is expected to have NSFW content, let Reddit know about it from the very beginning. |
Basic requirements for creating a Reddit community.
Before creating a Reddit community, please make sure that:
- You’re creating a 100% new community that does not yet exist on the website;
- Your community doesn’t interfere with Reddit’s content policy;
- You’re not engaging in any type of vote manipulation or online fraud.
In sum, the hardest part of creating a Reddit community is ensuring it’s based on an original and interesting topic. If you intend to use the community to sell on Reddit, you should also certify that it relates to your brand in one way or another.
Once your Reddit community is up and running, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to the real hard work: building it from the ground up from an empty Subreddit and into a vibrant and active community!
How To Grow a Reddit Community (7 Tips)
The following tips on how to grow a Reddit community are designed to make sure your “newborn” Subreddit gets to where you need it to be. They work out not only for Redditors who are just trying to have fun but also for marketers looking to promote their brand.
1. Find Your Audience with KeyMentions
The first step to growing a Reddit community is to find people who would actually like to join it. For marketers, doing so is all about identifying Redditors who have a specific interest or need that’s connected to the products or services you’re trying to promote—in other words, your target audience.
Considering that Reddit is populated by roughly half a billion people, identifying the right John and Jane Doe to join your brand-new community can be tough. Luckily, you can count on KeyMentions to quickly find that needle in the haystack. But how?
The first step is to come up with keywords relating directly or indirectly to your brand. If you’re selling beauty products, for example, you may want to monitor keywords like best beauty products online, face moisturizer, or vegan facial serums.
Once you have settled on a decent list of keywords (you can choose as many as you want), use them to set email alerts on KeyMentions. The alerts can be customized to include only posts that are recent or have a minimum/maximum number of comments and upvotes.
After setting the email alert, you will be notified instantly every time a Redditor mentions your brand or selected keywords. A Redditor who’s asking around for vegan facial serums, for example, would be a perfect fit for your Reddit community on vegan beauty products.
Once you have identified potential community members using KeyMentions, you can take action by commenting on their posts or inviting them directly to your community with a Private Message (PM).
Important note: PMs may not always be supported on Reddit’s browser website. So, in case you’re unable to send a PM via the website, download the Reddit app or log in to Old Reddit.
2. Use Subs For Promoting New Subs
Another way of growing a Reddit community is to promote it on Subreddits that have been specifically created to showcase new communities. New Reddits is the most pertinent and popular of them all, but there are more:
- Birth of a Subreddit: A place for discussing the creation of new communities, but where you can also promote communities that have just been created.
- Promote Your Subreddit: Pretty self-explanatory.
- Tiny Subreddit of the Day: A cool page where an up-and-coming Reddit community gets promoted every day—can yours be the next?
- There’s a Reddit for that!: A great resource for finding out if other Subreddits out there resemble your future Reddit community.
- New Subreddits: Just like New Reddits, but without as many rules.
Using these helpful subs won’t cost you a dime or take away too much of your time, so make sure to try them out.
3. Vote on Every Post & Comment
Positivity generates positivity, and—when it comes to Reddit—that’s a statement backed by legitimate scientific studies. The general idea is that, if you upvote every post and comment on your community, it will gain traction and attract members more quickly.
A joint research involving scholars from NYU, MIT, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem determined that, when a post or comment gets the first upvote, it is 32% more likely to receive a positive second vote.
Weirdly enough, the same study also determined that comments that get a first positive upvote are more likely to get a second negative vote. Therefore, voting on every post and comment is always a great method for growing a Reddit community.
4. Engage in Cross-Posting
Cross-posting is a little-known Reddit feature that can do wonders for new communities. The idea is that you can directly take a post that’s on one Subreddit and share it on another. The shared post will link directly to the original Subreddit, i.e., your Reddit community.
So, if you have commented something about the latest Yorgo Lanthimos flick on r/TrueFilm (for example), you can easily cross-post the comment so it shows up on r/Movies or any other relevant Subreddit.
Here’s how cross-posting in Reddit works:
- Select the post you want to cross-post;
- Click on the button [Share];
- Select [Crosspost] in the drop-down menu;
- Click on [Choose a Community];
- Identify the Subreddit where you want to share your post and hit [Post].
Please keep in mind that cross-posting isn’t available for all Reddit communities. A few Subreddits simply don’t allow it, while most require you to be a member in order to cross-post.
5. Recruit Some Mods
Reddit moderators are people in charge of monitoring communities on Reddit, and recruiting at least a couple of mods for your new community is one of the best ways of improving its visibility and ensuring it’s running properly.
These are the most important things moderators can do on Reddit:
- Remove posts and comments;
- Restore previously removed posts and comments;
- Mark posts as NSFW and Spoiler;
- Lock threads and comments from receiving more posts;
- Edit submission titles.
Finding moderators can be as easy as sending a PM to your Reddit buddies or to members of your community who are particularly active. However, it can be tough to enlist moderators if you’re just starting your activity on Reddit.
For Reddit beginners, we recommend the super helpful Need a Mod page to recruit people who’d be interested in helping run a community. It works like an online job marketplace, but it does so in the form of a Subreddit with more than 35K members.
Because being a Reddit moderator is not the same as being a great Reddit moderator, you should also learn a little bit more about what it takes to moderate Reddit communities like a pro. You can find lots of useful resources in this Mod-training Subreddit.
6. Do Not Spam!
Spam started as a food, appeared in a Monty Python sketch, and was later popularized as a term to refer to “any unsolicited communication sent in bulk.” Spam has thrived online pretty much ever since the World Wide Web was invented, but it’s not particularly useful on Reddit…
While it may be tempting to grow your Reddit community using bulk messages that potentially reach thousands of users, Reddit has a zero-tolerance policy against spam, and most Redditors hate it even more.
Additionally, using Spam as a method for growing your community doesn’t guarantee that you attract the right people to your community. For this reason, it’s best to use social listening tools such as KeyMentions to target users who have a potential interest in your brand, and not just users at random.
7. Play Into the Things Redditors Love
Even though Reddit has tons of marketing potential, the typical Redditor isn’t looking to buy products or get to know new brands. Most of the time, you (and everybody else) end up on Reddit because you’re bored…
Sure, people also use Reddit extensively to debate with others, learn, and—yes—review and compare products and services. But the vast majority of Redditors are of the scroller type; they’re just looking for entertainment, and they will adhere mainly to entertaining stuff.
This information is crucial for guiding content creation in your Reddit community. To make it grow, you can’t just rely on good Reddit promotion. You also need to create posts and comments that resonate with Reddit’s peculiar user base.
For this reason, playing into the things Redditors love is adamant. Memes and cat videos will always have an impact, but so will up-to-date news, controversial political and scientific topics, localized content, and celebrity sponsors, so go and make the most of it!
The Benefits of Reddit Communities For Brands
So, you have learned how to create and build a Reddit community. Now, the question is: Is investing in Reddit communities worth it? And how, exactly, can it benefit your brand?
These are some of the most important pros of Reddit communities for brands:
- Targeted marketing: By using Reddit social listening tools like KeyMentions, you can cut through the noise and target only the people who have a potential interest in buying your products or services.
- Market insights: You can also use KeyMentions to monitor your competitors on Reddit and get valuable market insights regarding your niche. See how they’re using Reddit communities to promote their services and try to learn from their victories and blunders.
- Real-time interactions: Reddit communities are perfect for interacting directly and in real-time with potential customers, driving both loyalty and engagement further. Use KeyMentions’ email alerts to identify active discussions and take part in them.
- In-depth content: Reddit communities are a free space for brands to create in-depth content relating to their products and services and address any questions posed by potential clients in an accurate, personalized, and timely manner.
Reddit’s ad revenue is expected to reach $1.5 billion in the next few years, and the number of companies investing in Reddit ads is continuing to grow. Reddit communities are great for organic campaigns, but they can also be used to better inform your advertisement expenses.
Get Inspired: Reddit Marketing Case Studies
Finally, let’s take a close look at four successful Reddit campaigns involving major brands. Get inspired by these four case studies to create highly efficient Reddit marketing strategies:
1. CAPCOM’s Launch of Resident Evil Village
Reddit is known to have huge gaming communities, and CAPCOM made the most of them to promote their 2021 survival horror game Resident Evil Village. In the 10 days preceding the game’s launch, CAPCOM invested heavily in paid ads and created a series of cryptic clues to be solved by Reddit users.
As a result, CAPCOM generated a lot of buzz around their new game and ended up selling more than eight million copies in roughly two years.
2. Noosa’s Yogurt Flavor Poll
Known for their whole milk Australian yogurt, Noosa decided to invest in Reddit marketing to decide which of their yogurt flavors was best suited to be served in school cafeterias. Their simple question ended up making the rounds on Reddit, captivating thousands of users and stirring an exciting online debate.
By allowing Redditors to partake in such an important business decision, Noosa increased purchase intent by 39% and grew 30% in brand favorability among Reddit users.
3. Adobe’s Video Ads
Adobe was one of the first major companies to invest heavily in Reddit marketing, tapping into its huge user base of students and young creative professionals. Nowadays, Adobe’s custom video ads for Reddit have already become a classic, but did they work?
Considering that Adobe’s Reddit ads have three-times the conversion rate of other Adobe video ads, there’s no doubt their Reddit marketing efforts have paid off.
4. Ad Council’s Seize The Awkward
The American nonprofit organization Ad Council hit a landslide with its Reddit-exclusive marketing campaigns, which most famously involved the creation of a mega-thread on the Seize The Awkward Reddit community.
As a result (and according to Reddit), Ad Council managed to create the “#1 CTR performance of any Ad Council campaign.” CTR means Click-through Rate, and it’s a crucial metric for evaluating the success of any online campaign.
Summary
Reddit communities are a bit like babies: It’s easy, even pleasant to make them, but it takes a lot of hard work to make sure they grow up to become model citizens. Nevertheless, mastering the Subreddit game is key for promoting your brand on “the front page of the Internet.”
By following our tips on how to create and build a Reddit community and using KeyMentions’ monitoring and email-alert features to manage all brand and keyword mentions, you can finally take your Reddit marketing efforts to the next level. So, what are you waiting for?
Oh, and please remember: Don’t be afraid to get crazy, creative, or walk the extra mile. If there’s a place where all those things can translate into new customers, sales, and improved brand recognition, that place is Reddit!
How To Create & Build a Reddit Community (FAQ)
Reddit communities are user-generated pages on Reddit that tackle a specific topic. They’re the same as Subreddits, but they have a decent number of active members.
KeyMentions is the best tool for localizing your target audience on Reddit because it lets you set instant email alerts based on brand and keyword mentions and the number of upvotes and comments associated with such mentions.
There are lots of Subreddits specifically designed to promote new Reddit communities, including r/newreddits, r/newsubreddits, and r/promotereddit.
A good place to start is…Reddit! The Subreddit r/needamod, for example, is like an online job marketplace for finding people who are potentially interested in working as mods for your Reddit community.
The main benefits of Reddit communities for brands include targeted marketing, valuable market insights, real-time interactions with users, and the possibility to create in-depth content relating to one’s brand.
