Reddit Makeover Part 9: Invest in time, resources and internal collaboration
If you have decided to develop and engage with audiences on Reddit, keep in mind that great audience engagement always takes time and 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 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.
During my collaboration with Barron’s, we started small with topics on stock value changes of big tech companies and Bitcoin, but learning about Reddit by doing was challenging. Great audience engagement on Reddit needs strategic planning and execution, including all the following steps in our case:
- Choose topics to start with
- Learn to use CrowdTangle to monitor trending conversations on Reddit
- Choose sub-Reddits to keep an eye on
- Set viral alerts on CrowdTangle
- Decide a related story to experiment with on Reddit
- Study Reddiquette and community rules of sub-Reddits that we are interested in
- Observe the conversation and atmosphere in the sub-Reddits
- Find the best moment to join the conversations
- Pull out snapshot of the story and tweak it to sound more conversational and friendly than the original article when interacting with Redditors
- Have editors review drafts of comments before publishing them on Reddit to ensure accuracy and consistency
- Keep an eye on responses from Redditors as they roll in. Respond to, interact and follow up with them.
All these procedures take time, resources and a lot of internal collaboration. For institutional publications with specialized audiences, like Barron’s, expertise in related field matters as well. Coming from a journalism background with a limited knowledge of finance and investment, I wouldn’t have been able to complete the Reddit debut for Barron’s without help from Alyssa, Alessandra and the two reporters, Tae Kim and Al Root. I was impressed by their expertise in this specialized field and appreciated the great collaboration.
If institutional publications want to venture into Reddit, I recommend that they do their best to find someone who is not only an expert in the related field but also an experienced Redditor. If you cannot find the two characteristics within one person, you should emphasize even more on collaboration between your Reddit experts and your topic experts.
I will talk about measurement of successful audience engagement on Reddit in the next few days. If you have any questions or thoughts on newsroom collaboration, comment under my post. I appreciate any insightful feedback, sincere appreciation and constructive criticism.
