Reddit Makeover Part 5: CrowdTangle, a Powerful Tool to Monitor meaningful conversations on Reddit

Screenshot of CrowdTangle’s homepage

CrowdTangle is a useful and effective tool to spot viral conversations, conduct competitive analysis of social media performance and track referral sources. It has become free since Facebook bought it in late 2016. Thanks to my amazing classmates, Nelson Oliveira (who mentioned the tool to me) and Renee Wang (who gave me a tutorial and set up an account for me), I got a CrowdTangle dashboard early on. I will show you how to use CrowdTangle to monitor trending conversations and save topics you are interested in on Reddit.

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.

Publishers can create new lists and add sub-Reddits under existing lists on CrowdTangle.

You can sort threads by different criteria. During my collaboration with Barron’s, we always sorted them by “Overperforming” to detect the most meaningful conversations on Reddit. The number I marked showed how much better the post outperformed the average in the related sub-Reddit, in this case, r/investing.

CrowdTangle allows you to sort overperforming threads during different time periods. To stand out from the crowd, publishers should search trending threads from the last 6 hours to the last 24 hours.

Leaderboard, the choice on the right of “Threads,” shows you how each sub-Reddit under your list performs by various criteria.

You can set up different types of notifications. We focused on Viral Alert so that we would have trending threads delivered to my inbox.

Once you choose “Viral Alert” and scroll down, you will have more options to customize the alert. You can also toggle the bar right next to the “Minimum Score for Notifications” to customize the score. In the screenshot above, 10x means that you will receive a Viral Alert if a thread from any of the sub-Reddits under the “Finance” list performs 10 times better or more than all other threads in the same sub-Reddit.

If you want to add any sub-Reddit under a list, go to the “Manage” tab on the list and search by keywords. CrowdTangle will then display a list of results for you to choose from.

You can also create your own list of sub-Reddits to monitor. Hit “Create List,” and you will see the “Untitled List” at the bottom of all lists. You can then name it, save it and add sub-Reddits under it, as I showed above.

CrowdTangle also allows you to save topics you searched. Hit “New Search” under “Saved Searches,” type a topic and hit “Search.” You can then sort threads by different methods I showed before. “More search options” will help you refine searches by different keywords, sub-Reddits and lists. Once you finish the search and would like to come back to it for more updates, hit “Save Search.”

Note: These are all the functions I used when collaborating with Barron’s. CrowdTangle has more functions for publishers to explore. Also, keep shares of your articles on Reddit and conversations around them under “Saved Searches.” Simply type the link below and repeat the steps described above.

https://www.reddit.com/domain/yourwebsite/

In our case, it is: https://www.reddit.com/domain/barrons.com/

We edited down the sub-Reddits under each list. We had a small team with limited resources, and therefore we needed to focus on the right communities to keep an eye on. Not all the viral conversations are worth participating in, which brings us to the next step, also the first step after your Reddit debut.

I will post more about choosing the right conversations on Reddit to join in next week. If you have any questions or thoughts on my quick CrowdTangle tour, comment under my post. I appreciate any insightful feedback, sincere appreciation and constructive criticism.