Using Reddit for Social Media Content



Creating a Social Media Content Strategy 

This week the self-proclaimed front page of the internet announced its latest feature: multireddits. While this feature has existed for some time, the update makes it a core feature of the Reddit experience for logged-in users.

 

Before tackling any Social Media Marketing campaign let’s first start by better surfacing our client’s brand identity, to ensure that we are creating a social presence that expresses the lifestyle and culture of our brand. Let’s try and save the “caturday” and TGIF posts for here.

 

Start with a brand questionnaire. Use this to tease-out your clients’ perception of their brand identity: it’s verbs, its adjectives, a personification of their unique product identity. Ask questions to steer the conversation towards one or another archetype “is your brand more Nirvana or Jack Johnson” or “is your brand more Luke Skywalker or Han Solo?”

 

For this article we will use Hand Up Australia as our case study. HUA is a nonprofit Social Enterprise that offers volunteer travel opportunities in Africa, Asia, Central and South America. Using the archetypes listed above we might suggest that Hand Up Australia, with its focus on altruistic endeavours and intrepid travel is a mixture of the “Caregiver” and the “Explorer” brand archetypes. This gives us an idea of how to characterise our content, and an introduction to the types of personas we might wish to target. If you need indepth guidance on identifying personas there’s an excellent articulation of that process here.

 

From this initial client-intake your goal should be to create a rudimentary content strategy that can be used as a guide for your forward activities. Below is a visualisation of what a content strategy might look like for a voluntourism organisation.

 

Using Reddit to Locate Social Media Content

With your brand identity decided, and personas isolated, your next step is create or locate content that speaks to this audience and brand identity. Your instinct should always be towards orginal content, this is the currency of the internet, but failing that sourcing extant content efficiently is the the best use of your billable hours.

 

Reddit is a microcosm of the larger internet, and its curated microcommunities are great at surfacing unique, compelling and popular content relevant to its self-identified audiences.

 

Start with a Reddit subreddit finder like MetaReddit.com (pictured). This site groups the thousands and thousands of subreddits using tags. With even a very broad idea of your topic and brand you can easily locate relevant subreddits. When you click one of the tags you can navigate to the image on the right which shows related tags and a breakdown of the content of that subreddit.

 

 

Within 5-10minutes you will locate a handful of related subreddits relevant to your client. The next step is to open these subreddits in reddit itself and use the sidebars (examples pictured below) to locate communities that the moderators deem relevant to their readers. By navigating between these subreddits and their sidebars you can find many related communities that can act as content sources.

This discovery process shouldn’t take much more than 30-45mins and you will have identified between 20-50 relevant communities that promote content they care about. With these individual subreddits isolated you can now use Reddit’s new multireddit feature to aggregate these accounts into a single page of “hot”, aka “trending”, content. Below you can see that we’ve labelled this multireddit “activism”. To see a subreddit of crowdsourced multireddits visit /r/multihub.

If you are just beginning your Social Media Marketing you can treat this methodology as a kind of Social RSS reader to find the all-time top content for your selected communities (select top > all time) or to newsjack topics that are “hot right now”.

 

In a lot of cases what you will see here may be longform text articles or otherwise less “Facebook-friendly” content. In the absence of original images you will need to source images from elsewhere to capture more interest on Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn or Instagram.

 

Here you can use an older multireddit methodology that is still supported by image-host Imgur. Prior to this weeks update users created multireddits by using the format reddit.com/philanthropy+socialpreneur… This format is still supported by Imgur (see below).

The resulting output then will be the most “viral” images for your aggregated communities that is hosted on Imgur and will look somewhat like the below.

Now then you have both the content (text) and the images that are “most viral” by your self-identified communities. How you add your branding to this content is at your own discretion.

 

Examples of this methodology in practice can be seen on Hand Up Australia’s Facebook page.

 

Alternative Sources of Social Media Content

Topsy

Topsy surfaces the most shared content on GooglePlus and Twitter, handily segmenting it into images, links, videos and more. This allows Social Media Managers to alternate content with confidence that it will resonate with their audience(s).

Rebloggy

Tumblr is probably the most underrated Social Media platform out there. This microblogging community has managed to maintain a young hip audience while other larger sites have routinely been invaded by “daggy” family members. As a result the content here is more insightful into the interests of users internal lives, and they are more expressive of their own identities. Rebloggy acts as an aggregator for Tumblr content and can be a great method of locating more actualised and individual content.

Facebook Hashtags

Perhaps most useful for “listening” to competitors activities within your vertical, Facebook hashtags allows you to unearth content that is being shared within the hastag space your brand occupies. This can be great for direct outreach to potential customers and parrallel competitors, or as a way of locating content ideas that are being shared, liked and commented on.

Pinterest Source Search

Along with the more obvious option to search for images tagged with your core topics, Pinterest allows you to investigate which images are being repinned from a given domain. This can give you insight into the images being shared from your own domain, a competitors domain, or from a potential content source like Reddit. Until recently Repinly also allowed you to identify the “most pinned” images on Pinterest, but it’s move to Postris loses much of this functionality.

BuzzFeed

Perhaps the most famous of social aggregators is Buzzfeed – a website that routinely uses the above sources and techniques to locate and identify its content, before rebranding, and repacking it in much the same way as 9gag, Know Your Meme, We Know Memes and others.

If all the above seems too unwieldly or complicated for your internal staff to adopt and implement, talk to AWD about your outsourcing your Social Media Marketing to us.

Enquire about our IT services today.