Reddit Makeover Part 3: Decide Your Key Topics; Build a Strong Profile

Screenshot from my capstone presentation slides. It shows what the Reddit avatar of Barron’s, a premier investing publication, looked like before my collaboration with them for my capstone versus after. I worked with their editorial development, design and reporting teams and Reddit’s Media Partnerships team to help them build a presence on Reddit from scratch.

Decide one to three key topics to start with

My collaboration with Barron’s started with a big challenge — it was impossible for our small team to engage with Redditors on all the topics we covered. Reddit has a plethora of content, and in contrast, we had a 6-person editorial development team, including one audience managing editor, Alyssa Zeisler, and one engagement editor, Alessandra Freitas, whom I worked closely with. They managed Barron’s other social media accounts at the same time. Therefore, we had to start small because of the limited resources.

Note: For my master’s capstone project, I worked with Barron’s editorial development, design and reporting teams and Reddit’s Media Partnerships team to help them build a presence on Reddit from scratch. I will be posting my findings and gradual steps for publishers to engage with Reddit users every week.

If you are new to Reddit, read the series step by step, as all of them are built on one another. Skipping one step will probably leave you confused when you read those after it. You can bookmark any article (if you are not logged in) or save it to your Medium account (if you are logged in) if you want to review it later. You can treat the guide as a workbook. Save it and refer back to it as you go through each of them to build a presence on Reddit.

his is a sample of various topics/interests Barron’s covers. Starting small means that we chose no more than three topics to experiment with on Reddit.

We decided to start with topics on stock value changes of big tech companies and Bitcoin investment. They are relevant to our mission and less complex than other topics on investing. Sticking to these two topics helped us build a decent comment history in the shortest time with our limited resources.

The key topics to start with should always reflect your missions. First impression matters, and I believe mission is one of the important factors (besides high-quality content, effective distribution and loyal readers) that make a news organization stand out in a crowd.

In our case, mission matters even more because we are an institutional publication with a more targeted audience (corporate decision makers, investors and financial professionals) than most other publishers that have experimented with Reddit, such as The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, National Geographic and Time. We stick to our mission and focus on topics and conversations that are related to investment on our websites and all social media accounts, including Reddit.

Build a complete, strong profile

Reddit values transparency from publishers, and one way to show it is to establish great profiles. We built ours from scratch.

Screenshot of Barron’s Reddit profile before my collaboration with them. It was empty, with no customized avatar, no cover image, no bio and no comment history.

Screenshot of Barron’s Reddit profile after we worked together to build a presence on the platform. We now have customized avatar, cover image and a strong short bio.

A few takeaways from the makeover of our Reddit profile:

• Your usernames should be the same as or very similar to those on your other social accounts so that users from there can easily identify you on Reddit. In our case, all usernames of our other social media accounts include “barrons.”
• Customized avatars and cover images can show your personalities and make you memorable and even impressive. We have a stock chart and our logo on our avatar, and our cover image shows covers of our previous issues. The avatar and cover image give Redditors a sense of who we are even before they read our bio.
• But this doesn’t mean that you can skip the short bio. Optimize your bios so that they convey your missions and the values you can bring to Reddit communities and encourage users to follow your profiles. Redditors need to know what they will gain from following your account before they take actions. As you can see from the screenshot above, our profile meets all the criteria of a compelling Reddit profile.

Reddit also has a Best Profile Practices to help you set up your profile, with examples of great profiles. It also lists more Reddit glossary.

I will post Reddit profile authentication and communication with its media partnerships team next week. If you have any questions or thoughts, comment under my post. I appreciate any insightful feedback, sincere appreciation and constructive criticism.