Reddit Makeover Part 7: Best Comments and Posts from Publishers
To all news publishers that are new to Reddit: Commenting on threads at the right moments is your lowest hanging fruit. It allows you to build a decent presence on the platform in the shortest time if you stick to Reddiquette and community rules of sub-Reddits that you interact with. Posts and AMAs require a more established relationship with Redditors and moderators, but you are free to comment as long as your content is relevant and meet community guidelines.
Reddit values open community. For publications with paywalls, consider including a snapshot of your stories in your comments.
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.
What are the elements of the best-performing comments?
- Transparency — include explanation of your reporting process and editorial decision. In the following comment, The Washington Post explained why it included a curse word in the headline when it covered Trump name calling African countries.
- Access — encourage users to reach you and show them how to. Again, the Post demonstrated a great example below. You don’t have to list contact information of your reporters and editors every time, but at least point them to an email address or other venue(s) that you are comfortable with them reaching you through.
- Humanity. A lot of journalists, I regret to say, are great writers but are bad at talking to people. However, Reddit is conversational. It values “you” and “us” over “he/she said.” Accuracy and fairness always matter regardless of platforms, but you need to present them in a conversational way instead of sounding like a dictation machine that reads aloud your website articles. The following comment from National Geographic is one of my favorite. On the World Photography Day, Nat Geo photographers disclosed their challenge and struggle at work behind all the great photos they took. They were very candid about what their daily life looks like.
How about elements of top-performing posts?
All the factors explained above apply to posts as well. In addition, I analyzed some best posts from The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News and National Geographic and found that they touched at least one of the following characteristics.
- Trump Presidency. I know we are tired of it after hearing about it a million times, but posts related to it did do well.
- Posts about local news are likely to perform well, a great opportunity for local publishers.
- What I personally think even better — Localize a national trend.
- Find the right communities. All the three publishers have their own profile pages that they can post to, but they published all the posts above under sub-Reddits instead of their own pages.
The potential of Reddit-native videos.
The consumption of videos uploaded directly to Reddit is rising. Reddit hits 1 billion video views and serves 13 million hours of videos per month, up more than 38 percent since the beginning of last year. Video viewers also have twice the engaged time compared with that of non-viewers on Reddit, DigiDay reported. Nat Geo has tried behind-the-scene footage before the Falcon Heavy launch on the SpaceX sub-Reddit and a promotional video for One Strange Rock, a series that it produced.
However, don’t publish posts until you build a decent comment history and get a greenlight from moderators of sub-Reddits you want to post to. Without going through the two steps, your posts are likely to be deleted. Reddit values conversation over promotion, and users are suspicious of posts from those whom they are unfamiliar with. Some sub-Reddits also require you to have a minimal karma score before you can publish posts, and the lowest hanging fruit to build up your karma score is to make great comments that are relevant to topics discussed and meet community guidelines. Even if moderators give your posts a green light, Redditors will still look at your profiles and comment histories when they see your posts. These are all the reasons why I emphasized that you should not start with posts and AMAs (the one I will talk about next) until you have establish rapport and recognition among Redditors and moderators through high-quality comments in relevant communities.
I will show you to set up for great AMAs next week. Also known as Ask Me Anything, AMA is a great way for publishers to engage with Reddit users. If done right, it will be insightful, engaging and fun. Meanwhile, I appreciate any insightful feedback, sincere appreciation and constructive criticism — if you have any.
