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