How To Customize Reddit For Social Media Marketing Effectively

We’ve all been there… Late night browsing, from story to story, only to glance up at the clock to realize you probably should have been in bed 2 hours ago! This is pretty much Reddit in a nutshell.

So it may come as a surprise to you that although you’ve wasted all that time, you may have been training yourself to create the ultimate social media content curation tool?

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In essence, this is what Reddit is, the cream of the crop content as reviewed by your Internet peers. While it’s upvote/downvote system doesn’t always ensure quality, it does provide content that is sure to be engaging, relevant, and timely.

That’s pretty much the holy trinity you’re looking for when aggregating content. Of course, I am not just suggesting heading over to Reddit to just grab a headline from the front page.

Understanding Reddit

As social media marketers we have industry verticals, we need to focus on. We need to curate niche content that addresses the clients we serve. For some agencies or social media marketers you could be focusing on one client or industry, others may be serving a variety of industries and clients. Fortunately, I can think of nowhere more niche on the Internet than Reddit’s subreddits.

In case you’re confused, let me just take a second to explain what subreddits are. Essentially, the way Reddit functions is by pulling the most popular information to your front page (Reddit.com) from smaller subpages. If you have an account on reddit, this information is different for each user because the information is pulled from individual group pages known as subreddits.

These subreddits are represented in the address bar as reddit.com/r/________. For example, the subreddit for general sports articles, discussion is /r/sports. If you were to travel to reddit.com/r/sports, you would see a variety of sports articles, and discussions from all over the internet that have been upvoted and downvoted by people on that subreddit.

There are over 600,000 subreddits ranging from the bizarre, to banal. Literally anything you can think of, someone has made a subreddit for it. Want to follow news about your favourite show? Or get cute pictures of cats everyday? There is a subreddit for you. And I mean it, there IS a subreddit for you check out https://www.reddit.com/r/onetruegod, or https://www.reddit.com/r/seashanties (I know, right?)

That’s where your verticals come in, what if we could subscribe to the perfect subreddits for all your clients verticals, and have them share content in one centralized place? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to do!

Stay with me and we will create a content monster for you to use for social media updates, content ideas, or a general reader to stay up to date with your clients industries.

Getting Started 

The first thing we’re going to have to do is create an account. Head over to reddit.com and click on the top right to create a new account:

Just follow the prompts to create an account. Please note, Reddit doesn’t require an email address to sign-up, but you may want to supply one in case you lose your login credentials:

*Remember to store your login name and password.

Subreddits and Content Curation

Once you’re a legit member of the Reddit family it’s time to start your customization! Just like Windows provides a variety of pre-loaded software like solitaire, the Reddit experience comes pre-loaded with a bunch of different subreddits.

Some examples of these are reddit.com/r/funny/ or reddit.com/r/worldnews, both pretty self explanatory. While a lot of these are great, and awesome for your personal account, that’s not what we’re doing here. We are going to want to unsubscribe to all of the defaulted subreddits.

To do that locate the thin bar on the top of the page marked MY SUBREDDITS. If you move the cursor over all the way to the right side of the screen you will see a link marked EDIT. Click on it!

Once you are here you will see all of your defaulted subscribed to subreddits marked in red, and also suggested subreddits marked in green.

Scroll down the page while hitting all of the red buttons to unsubscribe to the default Reddits. Keep in mind there could be a couple of pages of these, so keep scrolling down to the bottom unsubscribing along the way and hit next to do the same thing on the next page.

Once all of the default subreddits are removed, it is time to put on your thinking caps and do some research. Write down all of the major verticals that you serve as a social media manager and start looking for some relevant subreddits.

There is really no ultimate tool to do this. So you really have to put some elbow grease into it. A google search i.e “best subreddits for lawyers” may yield the best results, but you can also use tools like http://metareddit.com/r/findareddit/. You’ll have to think a little outside of the box, but they’re easy enough to find with some critical thought. Try and subscribe to subreddits that have active membership, which you can see when you take a jump inside.

Once you find a subreddit in the vertical you deem worthy, it’s time to add it to your account. Visit the subreddit you would like to subscribe to. In this case let’s jump to an SEO subbreddit http://www.reddit.com/r/seo. Once you’re here click the green subscribe button on the right side of the screen.

Rinse and repeat! Add all of the subreddits you wish to create your ultimate content curator. Now, when you head to reddit.com and sign in under the account that we created earlier, you will get the best content from all of your niche subreddits!

It’s as simple as that! Just remember, the real dilligence here is in the reasearch to find the perfect subreddit(s) for each industry. This can be an art in itself. Now that you’ve got the concept down, it’s time to do some subreddit hunting. Remember to review your subreddits regularly to ensure they’re all relevant.

Happy hunting social media marketers, and feel free to question or comment below.