How to Use Reddit to Grow Your Small Business for Free
Chris Christoff — March 8, 2019 — March 8, 2019
When business owners think about growing their company, they often think about using social media marketing. Social media, in most of our eyes, refer to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and more. However, there is one social media platform that has a vast following and can easily help you grow your company exponentially.
We are talking, of course, about Reddit. Currently, Reddit has a following of over 330 million unique users and well over 18 billion page views a month. While this platform is a little quirky and takes some getting used to, it’s an excellent way to expand your reach and score more conversions.
Let’s take a look at Reddit, check out how it works, and explain the methods some are using to expose their brand to a wider audience.
Build Your Karma
Reddit is unlike any other social media site out there. Where most sites encourage you to make a profile using your full name and date of birth, Reddit is the complete opposite. This website thrives on anonymous users.
You may wonder how it’s possible to promote your brand in an effective way if no one knows exactly who you are. Well, despite not knowing who you are, Redditors have a way to self-police who is being honest and valuable to the community by having access to every single previous post you made. People might not be able to recognize who you are right away, but they can gauge how trustworthy you are and what kind of value you bring to the table by looking at your comment/post history.
Karma is the “score” on your account. As you post valuable information, people can upvote or downvote your comment. If you end up with more upvotes this will impact your karma score. As you work towards growing your small business try to actively build your karma so you’ll appear as a reputable member of the community.
Your Karma will appear directly on your profile page, as you can see below. Your average Karma score is going to depend on how long you’ve had your account, how often you post, and which subreddits you post in.
Use the Correct Subreddits
Speaking of Subreddits, one of the best ways to grow your small business for free is by using the correct subreddits for your niche. For example, if you’re a WordPress plugin developer, you’ll want to do a quick search of WordPress from the Reddit homepage. The results make it clear which subreddits can benefit from your expertise.
As you can see, some of the groups like r/WordPressPlugins only has a little over 7,000 subscribers. However, some of the other subreddits like r/WordPress has almost 63k followers and r/Web_design has a stunning 362k subscribers!
You should also consider subscribers and posting to Subreddits that are not exactly in your niche, but still have the potential to have your customer base around. For example, the subreddit r/deals is full of daily awesome deals that people find and share with the rest of the group.
If you’re running a special on your website, or just looking to expose a wider audience to your product, this is a great place to start. The people here are already looking for great products to buy, so it just comes down to winning them over with a great product and deal.
Encourage Customer Engagement
Despite the fact that being anonymous is encouraged on Reddit, you can still use the platform to interact with your audience. There are multiple ways you can increase your engagement using this platform.
One of the most common methods is known as AMA, or ask me anything. AMA is used by businesses, celebrities, and even just everyday people looking for an interesting conversation. You can use an AMA to encourage potential customers to ask about you, your business, and products. This interaction is important for getting potential customers invested in your brand personality.
You can also set up a sort of customer service line in your own subreddit. Allow customers to come to you with their concerns or problems and try to be there as often as possible to help. A social media marketer can keep track of metrics and also assist your customers and help build trust in your product and team.
Conclusion
Once you get used to the quirky nature of Reddit and most of their users, you’ll soon discover that it’s a great social media platform for growing your business. You won’t have to spend any money — unless you opt to use their paid ads program.
However, you’ll still be able to use some simple methods and your time to improve brand awareness and help establish a strong presence across one of the most popular websites in the world.
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