Reddit Makeover Part 6: Join the Right Conversations

Screenshot of redditinc.com

Sort through trending threads on your CrowdTangle dashboards (check my previous post to learn more about CrowdTangle and how to use it to monitor trending conversations on social media) to find ones that are relevant to your topics and consistent to your tones. Dom DiFurio, web producer at The Dallas Morning News, says that Reddit is like a cocktail party — you observe the atmosphere and then find the best moments to jump in. This can be a big challenge. How can you decide which conversations to join in from various sub-Reddits on your lists and hundreds of threads under them? The following two tips will be your lifesavers.

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 keep 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.

Tip #1: Decide whether the sub-Reddit that host the conversation you want to join in matches your topics and tones. Take a look at the community rules of the sub-Reddit in addition to Reddiquette, and then look at the top comments and posts in the sub-Reddit.

When you go to a sub-Reddit, you can always find the community rules on the right column. You may need to scroll down twice to four times before you can see them.

The same technique works if you enter a post through your CrowdTangle dashboard. Community rules of sub-Reddits are always in the right column, just a few scrolls away. You can click on the arrows next to each rule to learn more about them.

After you familiarize yourself with the community guidelines, you can sort out top posts and comments of all the time. Given the democratic self-moderation on Reddit, upvote/downvote, you can notice what kind of content and tone the community values the most. (Wonder how upvote/downvote works? You can learn about it and digest common jargons and rules on Reddit in five minutes.)

You can sort out top-performing posts in a sub-Reddit and the top comments under the posts. You can either see the comments by the best or by the top. I will explain different sorting methods in the following paragraphs.

Note: Seeing top posts of all time gives you a sense of what kind of contents the community highly values. However, top ones from all time might be archived, meaning that users cannot post under them anymore. If you are looking for conversations to join in, you should look into the top ones in the past 24 hours (on Reddit and CrowdTangle) and 12 hours (choice available on CrowdTangle) after taking a look at top ones of all time.

You can also filter by the top (posts that have received the most upvotes) when you track shares of your stories on Reddit.

You may also have noticed that there are several different sorting methods other than “top.” For posts, you can sort by:

• “Hot” — those have got a lot of votes in a short time
• “Rising” — those with high chance of being “Hot”
• “Controversial” — those with a lot of upvotes and downvotes

For comments, sorting options other than “Top” include:

• “Best” — ranked by the result from the number of upvotes minuses downvotes
• “New” and “Old” — determines whether to see the latest or the oldest posts first
• “Controversial” — those with a lot of upvotes and downvotes
• “Q&A”

During my collaboration with Barron’s, we sorted posts by “top” from the last 12 hours to the last 72 hours and sorted comments by “top” or “best.”

Tip #2: Keep an eye on a thread that interests you in a sub-Reddit. Even if you have learned Reddiquette and the specific community rules, conversations within a post in the community may still vary. Again, filter comments under the post by “top” and/or “best” to ensure that the conversation is relevant to your topics and the tone is consistent to yours.

We were very selective about conversations to join in on Reddit. For example, we were notified by CrowdTangle that a post sharing our article about Bill Ackman, who had a controversial records of investment, but we decided not to step in because the conversation around the post was nothing but satire, inconsistent to our rational and analytical tone.

In contrast, we jumped into the conversation around the right time to buy Apple stocks in r/stocks. We monitored the sub-Reddit using the two techniques I just talked about and knew that Redditors in this community preferred critical analysis of stocks.

The following example is one of the top comments under the post.

As you can see, there was not name calling or any satire, and the user backed his/her viewpoint with analysis. The topic of the conversation was key to our mission, and the tone matched ours. After we observed the atmosphere, we figured out the right moment for us to join in the Reddit cocktail party.

I will post more about the specific steps to engage with users on Reddit next week. If you have any questions or thoughts, comment under my post. I appreciate any insightful feedback, sincere appreciation and constructive criticism.