Reddit Makeover Part 1: Reddit — Publishers’ New Frontier of Audience Engagement
Reddit is known for its highly engaged users and robust conversations, but it is a difficult and risky proposition for news publishers to gain a foot hold there. Reddit has its own culture, which is suspicious of self-promotion. This has held newsrooms back, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Reddit Makeover, a guide that I developed in collaboration with Barron’s, the world’s premier investing publication, demonstrates how news organizations can establish a compelling profile on Reddit and engage with users there from scratch. It will guide publishers to venture into the new frontier of audience engagement.
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. Starting from today, 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.
Reddit in numbers — a great opportunity for audience engagement
- Reddit is the fifth most visited site in the U.S.
- It is the ninth-most popular website in the world, ranking above Amazon (which sits at the tenth globally) and Twitter (the eleventh).
- Reddit has 14 billion monthly page views.
- There are over 330 million active monthly Reddit users, also known as Redditors.
- About 80 percent of Redditors are between 18 and 34 — more than 260 million young users if you do the maths.
- Eighty-one percent of Reddit users reportedly don’t have an Instagram account, while 51 percent aren’t on Twitter. However, Redditors are passionate about the topics they care. They initiate and participate in various robust conversations on the site, showing great potential opportunities for publishers to develop new audiences who may not exist elsewhere.
- Reddit has more than 138,000 active communities, also called sub-Reddits
- The average session length on Reddit is 14 minutes, surpassing time-sinks like Facebook (which averages 10 minutes) and YouTube (which comes in at just under 9 minutes).
- Roughly 70 percent of Reddit users come to the site for news, and publishers have a lot to gain from developing their audience on Reddit. The site remains an influential source of story ideas for publishers. “It’s a place where our fans flag content for us and highlight things we should be covering,” Kate Coughlin, the director of audience development at National Geographic Partners, said in a DigiDay interview.
(The facts above without links came from my conversation with Reddit’s Media Partnerships team.)
However, with great opportunities come high potential risks.
First of all, Reddit is hard to navigate. It is one of the most text-heavy social sites with millions of posts and comments. It is impossible for social media and audience engagement teams at any newsroom to go through all of them.
Reddit is also known for anti self-promotion. It now allows news publishers to make profile pages and has loosened the bar of the “1 in 10” rule (no more than 10 percent promotional content allowed, different from rules of many other social media). However, Redditors still prioritize conversations over promotion. They remain very cautious about links from news organizations without explanation, making it hard for publishers to join in conversations on the platform.
Community guidelines also vary among different sub-Reddits. Each of them has their own written and unspoken rules. Volunteer moderators reserve the right to delete comments and posts that they think violate the rules.
In addition, it is hard to evaluate performance on Reddit. I have seen very few discussion on the measurement of success on the platform.
In a nutshell, news organizations are not used to the endless threads, anti-promotion culture, various community guidelines and lack of measurement of success on Reddit. The unfamiliarity has cause them fear to join it. However, if newsrooms interact with Redditors in right ways, they can develop highly engaged audience on the platform. The Reddit Makeover series will guide news publishers to establish strong profiles on the platform and engage with users there from scratch.
I will post some basic knowledge of Reddit that publishers should know before stepping into the platform next week. If you have any questions or thoughts, comment under my post. I appreciate any insightful feedback, sincere appreciation and constructive criticism.
