Getting Started With Reddit: The Future of Online Conversations
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Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want to know how to navigate the ever-changing marketing jungle.

Today, I'm going to be joined by Brent Satoris.

And we're going to talk about Reddit. We're going to talk about how to get started with Reddit, which is a fascinating platform that really, I believe, and my guest believes, is really the future of online conversations. So if you are a complete rookie when it comes to Reddit and you have no idea what its opportunities are, you're going to definitely want to pay attention to today's interview. And even if you're someone experienced with Reddit, you might find today's interview very interesting.

By the way, if you're new to this podcast, be sure to click the follow button on whatever podcasting app you're listening to so you don't miss any of our future content. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Brent Sotoris. Helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide.

Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Brent Satoris. If you don't know who Brent is, he is a Reddit marketing strategist. He's also the CEO of OGS Media, a consultancy that helps businesses succeed on Reddit. He's also managing partner at Search Engine Journal. Brent, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? Hi.

I'm great, man. I really appreciate it. I'm excited to be here. It doesn't take much to get me to talk about Reddit. And we had a fun couple pre-conversations on this. So I'm excited. I'm genuinely excited. I'm stoked you're here. And today, Brent and I are going to talk about how to get started with Reddit. Because a lot of people probably don't understand what's going on there. Now, before we go there...

I'd love to know, how did you get into marketing? How'd you get into Reddit? Start wherever you want to start. So it's an interesting story. My whole life has kind of been one of those really random, interesting stories. My father was military, so I was, you know, raised a military brat. So I jumped around a lot and I'd gotten on computers, you know,

early when I was like seven, eight years old, my mom got me a Commodore 64 and I started one of those. Yeah. And I started to BBS hopping and stuff like that. And so my mom got the first long distance bill and she was like, that's it. Cause you know, they're all over the place. And so I, you know, I had a lot of fun and I was always around computers, but I ended up joining the military. And while I was a meteorologist in the air force and I was stationed in Tokyo and

And on the way back, I ended up going to Hong Kong for a while. And I met an individual and started a business where I would help companies get underwriter laboratory certifications, UL certifications for electronics, right? And in doing that, I would like post little posts online or I would create a website or I was poking around and I inadvertently ended up learning about SEO. And

That business didn't work out. I ended up getting a job as an SEO for an assisted living facility. So I had like 100 websites. And long story short, I ended up moving to San Francisco. And they wanted me to come out and kind of manage the, you know, the initiatives from out there. I was like, sure, why not? Ended up moving out to San Francisco. And

At about the same time I moved out there, Digg was launched and Reddit was launched. And it was very early in kind of the social media space. But there's a guy you might know who he is. A lot of people do, Neil Patel. And I met Neil Patel at a conference and a guy named Todd Malico. And we started kind of running around together and started focusing on playing with Digg and Reddit and seeing could we get our content to the front page. And at that time, if you got to the front page of Digg or Reddit, it would crush your server. Right.

It would totally break your whole server. So I had been in this whole industry maybe about three months. And I was out in San Francisco. And my buddy's like, hey, Brett Tabkeep wrote this post about speaking. And I bet you if you could get it to the front page of Dig, you would make a name for yourself because nobody had ever gotten anything SEO related to the front page of Dig. So I found a little section at the bottom that was like, how do you speak when you're drunk?

Right. And so, or have you been drinking and stuff like that? So I focused on that, got it to the front page of digging like five hours and totally dropped the entire PubCon site. Right. And to this day, Brett will still say it's one of the biggest traffic drivers that, that one URL. Well, I ended up going to the conferences, you know, I was in San Francisco. I ended up going to PubCon and he pulled me in and was like, you have to come speak about this. Now, mind you,

I have only been knowledgeable or even involved for like three months at the time. So I was a little nervous about it. And then Danny Sullivan, who had just launched SMX, was like, we're doing the first social media conference in New York. We'd love for you to come out and talk about Digg. I ended up going and speaking there, speaking at PubCon. And six months into the industry, I ended up having my own agency and I was focused on

social media marketing. So I was very early into the social game and it really resonated with me because in Tokyo, I was there when Yahoo Japan launched Yahoo Answers and they're disconnected, right? Yahoo and Yahoo Japan are two separate entities, right? They're just connected by the brand. So I

So answers came out way before it did in the U.S. there. And I remember seeing like all my friends would like work so hard to get the right answer. So get these little accolades and these little points. And I thought to myself, man, that is really interesting to see humans like really working hard to kind of like have that social presence. And so when social media blew up here, it just made sense now.

And I started taking clients and getting them, you know, into social and having success there. And that turned into full, you know, company and agency. And I ended up being in the industry now for almost 20 years and, you know, speaking, doing all the fun stuff that comes with it. Love it. So somewhere along the line here,

Well, take us up to the present. What are you doing now? Yeah, so I've always been like a really big fan of social and not just because of a platform, but because I genuinely am fascinated with like futurism and psychology and how societies adopt.

right it's always been a big thing for me invention's great i i played with vr in 1999 in tokyo at canon camera on one of the first like mixed realities 20 years later nobody's using vr right you know so it's it's not invention it's adoption so i was always fascinated by social in general and so over the years what i realized is most marketers and you're going to hear me talk about this a lot

marketing was always like, how do I do that without all the work, right? Like, how can I get that same result from that TED Talk speaker and that campaign that probably took nine months and $100,000 and tons of research and get it for nothing, right? And so that always kind of bugged me. And so I was able to walk the line between like social user and marketer without, you know, really upsetting either side. And so that

kept me all the way through today where I still continue to work with Reddit and so forth. I did end up spending a lot of time and still do with Search Engine Journal. It's a lot of fun. It's a platform where I can really kind of mentor and work a lot in that regard. But right now, Reddit, as a lot of people I know, has really exploded in popularity. And it's something that

I've seen coming for a long time, but now everybody's super excited about it. So I've been kind of drawn back into the Reddit world a lot more and now I'm fully immersed in it on a daily basis. Love it. So for those of my listeners that are not really active on Reddit, what are the upsides if this is done right? Like explain to everybody what the Reddit advantage is and kind of what

can be the outcome if this is done right? From a basic standpoint, if you look at the demographics and the numbers around Reddit, you're going to see that...

probably at least half of all Americans and half of all North America is on Reddit every single day. And so you're talking to an audience that when you look at the stats, it's like 70% college educated, has a median income of like 65,000 plus. It sways a little male, but not by much, probably like 54% male and 46% female. But it's an audience where

All the forum members, all the people that didn't really go into the quick and two-second Twitters and the memes and all the stuff that was more entertainment-based, Reddit really captured that continued conversation. And so the opportunity, and it has been and is today, the ability for you to literally get in front of your target audience

Like no other place, right? And so people like Bill Gates figured this out a long time ago. So a lot of Bill Gates' marketing is not done through other traditional channels. He has an account on Reddit and he hosts AMAs, Ask Me Anything, like interview formats.

And he'll go there for every initiative he has. And he does a huge campaign there. And so do a lot of other celebrities, a lot of authors, because it's a place where you can instantly interact with your audience in a meaningful way. And users on Reddit feel like if you're on Reddit,

Because a lot of the audience is anonymous and so they can say what they want, they like a challenge, they love to figure out if you're wrong on something or kind of dissect information, it's hard to be on Reddit for them. They feel like if you're on Reddit, you're not just one of these companies who opened a Facebook account or a Twitter account. If you're on Reddit...

you've proven that you belong on Reddit. And so they have a lot of respect for that. And they end up listening to you and taking, you know, what you have to say a lot more meaningful to them. So the opportunity, you know, there's example of example, like a guy who is, his parents own a beef jerky company, right? So randomly he's in a thread and somebody's like, well, why is beef jerky so damn expensive, right?

And he says, well, you might not understand it, but each piece of jerky is a full steak that gets, you know, kind of shrunk down and dehydrated and so forth. And the quality meat that is required. So you're really buying like a bag of steaks. Right. And so this guy goes, wow, you know a lot about beef jerky. And he's like, well, my parents own a beef jerky company. And so they say,

discount code question mark, right? So the guy posts the discount code and they end up inviting him to do an AMA and he ends up coming back and posted the guy's does like $36,000 in sales on a weekend for a mom and pop shop, you know, beef jerky spot. And probably to this day is still seeing value. I'm still talking about it, you know, 15 years later. And these examples happen over and over and over.

So you don't have to be a major brand to get directly in front of your audience. And your audience is there for you, not just to listen to you, but to engage with you. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for people. For those that are like thinking about Facebook groups versus Reddit, you want to just give me, I mean, I'll tell you what,

It sounds like Zuckerberg tried to create Facebook groups to be an alternative to Reddit, but I will tell you right now, anybody who's active on Facebook knows that they're depreciating the feed exposure of groups and you have to go find them. Do you feel like this is a completely different function than Facebook groups? I'm just curious what your thoughts are before we get into getting started with the etiquette and stuff. Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question because, you know, sometimes I describe communities similar to how I would describe a Facebook group, right? Yeah.

But they're fundamentally different in how you approach them. Facebook in general is different. You're about connecting with your family. You're about kind of listening to what a select group of people have to say and then giving a voice to that. There is a sense of leadership, a sense of ownership of that community by a certain group of people. Reddit, even though it has moderators, the core basis of people on Reddit is that they're

It's a complete community that there is no person. There is only topic, right? So there are no influencers on Reddit. There's no, you know, somebody's more important than another. And even the CEO and the founder, Steve on Reddit will get trashed all the time in communities. And so will a lot of other people, celebrities. If you don't,

follow the proper protocols of the community, regardless of who you are, you get dragged by that community. So in essence, Facebook past,

pages is a place to go and kind of follow almost like a live newsletter or a live kind of landing page where Reddit really truly is a community of peers that are there to not make you feel good, but to give answers to questions and have discussions and dialogue around topics. So let's get into some of that etiquette a little bit. What's Reddit's views towards marketers? This is an interesting thing because I've never really, I've always found that most people

you know, people, whether it's delicious. I remember delicious is founder up one time saying we hate marketers member, you know, at the conference and it was like a big deal. Right. I think a lot of people will tell you they don't like marketers, right? They being Reddit. Yeah. Reddit or just a lot of companies don't like the idea of marketers because they don't like the idea of being marketed to people don't want to be sold. Right. And so every time there's marketing, they feel like there's some strings attached and so forth.

So Reddit has a reputation of saying, if you're a marketer, then you're innately bad. And therefore, we don't want you here. However, Reddit is like people, right? Nobody wants to be marketed until they know you. Once they know you, they think you're cool, then you can sell your product all day long and you can do what you want. And it's not a problem, right? So I think that Reddit's view on marketers is that they don't want to be blindly marketed to.

They don't want you to be there to sell them something. If you're there to be a part of the community, just like if you were in a community event with a group of people and somebody brings up, hey, I really need a lawyer for this. And you say, oh, you know, I happen to be a lawyer. I could help you out. That's a welcomed experience.

you know, marketing, right? So people want information. They want solutions. They want to go on their journey in a positive way. They don't want you to interrupt that flow with your marketing. What other etiquette tips do you have? I know we talked about this civic center example. I don't know if you want to mention that. Yeah, I think

I think that the biggest thing, you know, and I used to say this with all social is that like, for some reason, when we went to social media online, we kind of forgot a lot of the key elements that are fundamental to being successful in a social group.

And I think that I always say like social online is not that different than social offline. The same rules apply. And that applies for Reddit, right? If you were going to walk, I think about it like a civic center, right? There's a community over there, somebody who's running a book club or something or something that you're interested in. If you were going to go to that event, it would be the same as if you went to that subreddit. Would you walk in, go up on stage, grab the mic and start talking?

No. Would you walk in and just start handing out business cards to everybody and promoting yourself? No, that wouldn't go well, right? The community wouldn't receive that. You go in, you look around, you get a sense for who's here. What are people talking about? What's the lay of the land? How do people operate here? What time of the week do they come together? Which topics are taboo? And when you learn all that, you start to learn who's a good part of the community. How can I provide value? So honestly, if you approach it

very similar, like you would a social group, you're going to go and visit, then you can have a lot of success on Reddit. More and more over time, I would say there is no single rule. There is the nuance of how the community works, right? And that's how it is in the real world. Oh, you can't market here. Well, how come Bob does? Well, Bob's been here 10 years and everybody knows him so he can sell his stuff, but you can't, right? Until you earn that respect. And that's

ultimately how Reddit functions. You know, they will tell you the rule is this until it's not that rule for certain people. And that's how society works. Okay. So we're going to get into kind of how to get started with, with Reddit. At this point, I may have scared a lot of my listeners because I mean, I'm a believer that

There's different kinds of marketers, right? And there's internet marketers or digital marketers, and then there's social marketers. And you can be a little bit of all these things. But what I love about what you're talking about here, Brent, is that social requires effort.

Right. And it doesn't necessarily scale. It's not something that can necessarily be automated. Right. And in this era we're in right now where everything is being AI generated and everything is being automated, this is a place where you can come and you can have relationships.

real conversation with real people. And the upside to this, my guess, Brent, is it all happens in public, right? And these threads have a life to them. Do they not, right? Absolutely, absolutely. The marketing benefit here is that this could...

And these things are also the AI systems are actually slurping up all this information. So it's feeding their large language models. Some of these things show up in search, right? So there is potential downscale benefits to these things. Would you agree? Yeah, I 100%. And that's the beauty of it right now is there is a look fundamentally.

As a marketer, as somebody looking to interact with your audience, you should be interested in being where your audience is at, right? The idea is not to go open a store in the mall and then tell everybody to go to your other store that's not at the mall. The idea is to be where people are at, right? Long-term wise, even today,

It's very clear that validation is missing from the normal user journey experience, right? Psychologically, you don't want to be told what to do. You want to be given information so you can come to a decision on your own. We all think that our problem is slightly nuanced and not like everybody else's. So we need to feel like we resolve that problem on our own. Search does not provide that experience.

So where Reddit kind of really comes into play today is the fact that it creates a validation phase. It creates a phase where when you go to search, you see sponsored posts, you see articles and guides, which you feel like is manipulated.

paid for, or they can't be as honest as they really want to because of their brand and they'll get in trouble. You know, you look at reviews and you're like, how much of this is really real? How much is it not? But when you go to Reddit, you don't actually get told what to think. You see nuanced hundred comments back and forth, different people having really in-depth conversations.

And who are the real experts that we're looking for? The people who are super passionate, right? The people on Reddit who have spent two years in a community talking about automotive, they know more about automotives than probably your actual mechanic down the street who's fixing your car.

because they're avid fans, right? And so when you create content that has depth, when you participate on Reddit in a way where you see these depth of conversations, what you're doing is you're solving more than the question. You're solving the user journey for people. And that's what Google,

Google and AI has been really seeking to do. And so they haven't been able to figure out how to do it in that scenario. And that's why you see so much Reddit content showing up in search. And that's also why you see OpenAI doing a partnership with Reddit in order to utilize that content to feed models. Google also will be utilizing that content to feed its future AI models.

And when you see that happening, you definitely have to acknowledge the fact that there is no other place right now. And maybe somebody will launch other things. Maybe they'll change. But even Quora is just a list of answers. There's no real interaction, no dialogue. There's no other place that feeds it.

And I would even say that if you watch how much open AI is being blocked from a lot of sources and the fact that they have such a strong partnership and the fact that they are testing search GPT and the use cases of people looking for alternative pathways to solve their user journey is increasing.

you can kind of see where Reddit is actually growing even now in authority as to how it feeds into what AI understands are the real intentions of users and the depth of those conversations.

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four, three, two. Let's get into like, where do we start? Let's just assume everyone listening has never been on Reddit before. We're just going to start from stage zero. So I want to say right off the bat, you said earlier, I might've scared my audience away. And what I really want to kind of come back and say is that like,

Anybody can be successful on Reddit, right? I mean, really, genuinely, it's not difficult. And for me, I've never thought it was difficult. I think that, you know, as long as you're willing to put the work in, which I think a lot of your listeners are, you can have success. You know, now, as a business, you need to figure out where to spend your time, right? So you need to understand if it makes sense. But

Reddit is actually really set up for you to be successful. Not only do you need to like kind of come in soft, like I said, in a civic center type environment, like come in. The first thing I would do is follow your hobbies, right? If you're into growing peppers, if you're a crafter of a painter, if you have a favorite TV show, these are the subreddits that you want to go and you want to subscribe to and you want to become a user.

When you understand the features, when you start to understand things like TLDR, too long, didn't read, give me the shortened version. When you start seeing things like OP as original poster, when you start understanding the language and the nuances, you start to understand how Reddit works. Then you could start kind of engaging, commenting back on things that you're very confident that you're going to be authentic about.

about, right? And this gives you an ability to understand how does commenting work and how do things kind of the nuances. Once you've kind of gotten a chance to play with Reddit, not only do I think you genuinely will find yourself engaged and entertained and you'll find new avenues of like learning quite a few interesting things about the stuff you care about, but I also think that you'll notice that there's a number of subreddits. Like for instance, there's a subreddit called new to Reddit, right? All of the

It's a place where it teaches you how to use Reddit. You can ask any question you want. I'm new to Reddit. What do I do with this? There's no dumb questions, right? It's a place specifically for first timers to learn about Reddit. Then there's learn to Reddit, which is a sandbox where you can go and test. I'm going to post this and you try out the images, you try out the features, and nobody's going to give you a hard time. It's just meant to allow you to test posting. There is a subreddit called Help.

which is there to answer your questions. There's a subreddit called Karma, which you can go to and learn like how do you start building authority? How do you start kind of becoming a better staple in the community? There are a number of subreddits out there. There are subreddits for when you get into the business side of it, where they do nothing but post brands and advertisers on Reddit doing campaigns and then talking about what they liked and didn't like about those campaigns.

You can really get into a lot of different areas of Reddit that are designed 100% to teach you how to use Reddit. But a lot of common sense comes into play as well, just treating it like a real community. Briefly talk about what karma is for people that may not understand that. Absolutely.

Karma is a score basically that you get based on your actions and your activities on Reddit, right? If you make a post and people thumb it up, which is the voting of something up in Reddit, let's say you get a hundred upvotes, maybe you get a hundred karma score, right? But then you get 50 downvotes. So you're at 50, right? And so based on your posting, based on your comments and based on the interactions that people have with those posts and comments, you get a sort of karma score.

that carries on your account. And why karma becomes important, it didn't used to be, right? It used to be kind of ignored. In fact, nobody cared about it. But where it's become important is that the subreddits have a lot of features to allow people to kind of auto-moderate or to control how many people are posting and so forth. So I can go into a subreddit I run, and I have a rather large one about marketing. I can go in there and I can say, if you're not 30 days old,

you can't post in my subreddit. If you don't have at least an average score of 50 karma and above, you can't comment or post. If you don't have a certain amount of karma, then all your comments could be hidden. There's a lot of things that you can start to do with controlling who has what rights based on how much karma they have. And a lot of people do implement this. Perfect. Okay. So

What I'm hearing you say is step one is set up your account, go into a topical area that you're personally interested in that may not be related to your business, just to kind of learn the lay of the land. Watch how people are interacting and commenting. And if you're

wanting to experiment, you can go to the new to Reddit subreddit or learn to Reddit or help or karma subreddit. Let's say we've been doing this for a little while. How long do you recommend we do this before we go to the next step? You know, I think the next step can come relatively quick, but it's a combination of the first and the second step for a while. I would say a couple of weeks. It depends on how much time you're really getting into it. If you fall in love with Reddit and you're on it every day, all day, you're going to know there's a certain point when you start to feel comfortable. Right.

That's the point when you want to move into the business side of it. Yeah, so tell us about the next step, the second step. Sure, so it's very similar in nature to the first, right? You've learned Reddit, its features, you understand how it works, you've understand the community and you start to notice there's rules in these subreddits and some of them might be silly rules, but they're pretty heavily enforced, right? And so you're noticing, man, they say you can't use any exclamation points and I keep getting caught using exclamation points. This really is lame, right? Whatever, so you start to learn that.

So now you move towards your business, whatever your industry is. And I wouldn't go super, super hardcore to like, what's my exact product? I would say, what's my industry? And now what you're starting to try to look for is how can I participate and start joining and start learning about these communities? Right off the bat, you can use your domain, right? So you can use the search query like you would in search. You do site colon, you know, mydomain.com and you search it. You're going to notice right off the bat

a bunch of, well, depending on your, you know, your site, you'll notice results that start to show you subreddits that that content has been submitted to. That's going to be your first step because you're going to identify, hey, these are subreddits where my content is already resonating. If it's not your content, maybe it's a competitor that you put their URL on or a specific phrase, you know, a long tail phrase or whatever. But you start to look for what subreddits

are these conversations already happening in? Just like Facebook groups, there's a bazillion of them. Are there bazillion subreddits on like the industry that you might be in? Like let's take marketing. There's gotta be an endless supply of them. So how do you discern between the right ones and the wrong ones? Is it just based on size or what's your thoughts on this?

There's a couple of things on that, right? First off, size matters, right? If you're going in front of an audience, it does have an impact. However, it's also important to note that, you know, these subreddits have been around sometimes 20 years and a million people might be only 10,000 that are really active, right?

And so there is an online number that will show up. It's not an exact number. It's an estimate. But if you open up a community, you see there's five people online in this community and you open up another community that says there's 50 online. Use it as a metric that there's 10 times more. Oh, so it's actually active people that are in there at that moment. Yeah. Okay.

Shows you that now, again, it's not super accurate, but it gives you a range. It just gives you a this is more active than that type of scenario. The second thing you really have to consider is obviously when you go into business, you have an initiative, something you're trying to push, right? You might be going in saying, I want to submit my articles, right?

Well, maybe this subreddit has a rule that says you can't submit URLs. There's no going around the rules. That's another thing you really want to kind of get your head wrapped around. Is it, if there's a rule that prohibits you from really doing what you want in this community, find another community because what you're going to do is just end up

you know, trying to subvert the rules and finding yourself getting in trouble for it. And by the way, if you get in trouble, I would imagine that's going to be the other Reddit moderators or whatever are going to know, and they're probably not going to let you in. Is that correct? Correct. When you get in trouble, what happens, and I do this all the time, is if I see people posting in a certain way, I open their account. Hey, are you posting like this on 20 different marketing subreddits? And normally I do see that it's the exact same post and

as soon as i see that permanent ban you're out of the subreddit forever and there is no and it's important to understand that subreddits are not run by reddit subreddits are communities that you make on the reddit platform but you as a user own that community right so if i as a user don't want your website on my site for no other reason than i don't like your website

That's just what it is. And Reddit will tell you, don't like that? Go make your own community and change the rules yourselves, right? So when you get in trouble, you're getting in trouble with a moderator who's looking at your account, potentially banning you, which means...

you'll still be able to come and see the content. But when you submit things, it just doesn't show up to anybody else. And sometimes people go nine months and they're posting, engaging. They don't even realize they're banned. And then I log out and look at their account and it says this account has been banned. And you're like, oh,

You've just been silent banned for nine months and you've been actively going at it, commenting, but getting nothing. It's because you're banned and nobody else sees it. And Reddit's like, well, what's that matter? If you can still interact and people just don't see you, you're still reading the content. If you're there for the right reasons, what's it matter? So definitely figuring out what are you trying to accomplish on Reddit? And does this subreddit...

match up to that initiative? And this is an important one. Do people agree with your point of view on that topic?

Because you could very much find a topic that's on automobiles and you're like, I'm a Corvette driver. I am definitely going to enjoy this. And then you realize over time that the community all hates Corvettes. Maybe they're all Japanese cars or something, right? Exactly. Right. So it's not only is it related, but is the angle that you're hoping to have the outcome, the tone of the conversation in line with you. Another thing to look at is,

Are they accepting to other brands' involvement? Are they looking for feedback? Are they going to be open to you being involved, right? Because it's a community, you can't just look at it as it is and just make this decision. You have to kind of weigh your odds. So finding 50 subreddits, yeah, there are hundreds of them.

thousands of subreddits. I don't think there is a topic that doesn't have a subreddit. So you're going to find 30 or 40. You're going to look at the size. You're going to look at the activity. And then you're going to look at the rules. Then you're going to go in and sort. Up at the top, you'll see a sort. You can sort by top.

Top means that at some point this thread was voted up enough that it reached the number one spot in the subreddit. So subreddits have a ranking one to whatever. And when you hit the top, that's the top. You're the most popular post in that subreddit.

Now, a subreddit of two people, it's pretty easy to hit the top. A subreddit of 20 million people, not so easy. So take it with a little bit of a grain of salt. But when you go into a subreddit, you can sort by top, say last 12 months and see the top 10, 20 posts. That's going to tell you what the most popular content in the subreddit is. Now you go through, comments are sorted by their votes. What are people commenting like?

Open up the moderator. Look at the moderator's history within that subreddit, right? And say, is this moderator very active? Are they commenting? Are they involved? What are they submitting? What are they talking about? This gives you a sense for understanding the community that you're going to go and invest in. Similar to what you would do with any marketing initiative. If you were going to run an ad in a magazine, you'd want to know about the demographics. You'd want to know what kind of people read it. You'd want to understand what your opportunities are.

And then once you've figured that out, once you kind of have a sense for the tone, the format, how the moderators are involved, then you can kind of start to come back and say, is this going to be good for all of Reddit? Or is it only good in a small bit? So with marketing as an example, marketing is very broad. Hey, you know what? I can have success in this subreddit. Great. Or you're in PPC for Idaho, you know, small businesses. Well,

that small subreddit is not going to have the breadth of the other ones, right? So am I in a subreddit that's massive in scope and in scale? Or am I in a subreddit where it's limiting what I can talk about? And how much time do I want to spend in both? And the balance is finding what's the ability for you to have the most visibility in the largest audience with the least resistance. That's fascinating. So how many of these groups do you recommend when we're kind of in this research phase?

that we should identify one or two or five or I mean, you know, I think in the research phase, it really is unending, right? You know, in the initial research phase, if you're searching marketing, like, for instance, let's say we take your site, we throw it in there and we say, hey, there's 10 subreddits right off

the bat. I'm going to open each one of those subreddits up and I'm going to open it up and I'm going to look at it. I'm going to say, oh, 10,000 people in this one, 200,000, 3.5 million. Okay. This one's got three people and nobody has posted in four years. Probably not the one I'm going to spend my time on. Right? So then once I can kind of look at that, then I'm going to say, okay, well, let me look at the rules. Is there any rules here that are going to absolutely prohibit my involvement? Right? Like absolutely no brands or companies allowed. Well,

That kind of puts me out. Right. And then once I see the rules are good, then I say, OK, well, I need to understand if the topic's going to work. Right. Am I going to have a good chance at having a topic that's going to resonate? That's the top sorting. So I can kind of see what that content is. At that point, I would probably pick.

four or five to start monitoring and watching and to pay attention to, right? Because you don't want to force opportunities. You want to receive them when they come available, right? I'll give you kind of like a little bit further even, and this is kind of going into like kind of the advanced user, but I'll tell you at,

that point, what I would really do is I would start to understand what are the different questions that people might be searching when they're looking for your product. And I would start watching those and looking for those and interacting and being helpful where I can. And if that opportunity is happening in the subreddit, that would make that subreddit even better because some subreddits are on topic with the audience, everything you want, but it's a subreddit for informing.

and not so much engagement, where some places are a place people are coming to find answers, and you're allowed to provide those answers. So you do have to kind of pick and choose. But I would say three, four, five, as a monitoring, I would really start kind of easy with winning stuff. Like don't pick the biggest debate to jump in on. Like when you do start engaging, you're looking at stuff where you can

kind of be very positive. You're in line with the conversation. You're just joining a positive conversation. You're keeping it light. This way you start to build a reputation. People start to see your name. The mods start to see your name. I love it. I have another tip I'll tell you real quick. Yeah, let's hear it. So another thing is I always tell people the mods are the ones who are going to determine whether you are going to exist in their community.

People are people. Like, they love flattery. Take the time to compliment them. Take the time to respond to their threads. Go and look at all the topics this mod has been submitting and go find topics that are related to what he submits. And then submit those. And then wait for the interaction and engage with that person. Because...

People are humans. And when you engage with somebody and you talk about things they like and you compliment them, then they tend to like you and they tend to want to accept you. And then when you go and post something, that moderator goes, you know,

I wonder if that's a company and they are posting. That sounds a little, but you know what? They're nice and they've been friendly. So, you know what? I don't care. Go ahead. Do your thing. And then you get yourself accepted and now you can participate freely and have more success. I love it. So you're already kind of transitioning into my next question, which is really about starting having conversations, which is like, I think the next step here. Talk to me a little bit about doing.

Do you start conversations or do you engage with existing conversations? Like, cause you know, again, assume we're beginners, right? And we've already done the work. We've opened an account. We started with some hobby areas. Now we've narrowed down into the industry. We've identified, let's say five subreddits. We're ready to start like interacting. Give us some tips on like, do we just post a question or do we just engage in other conversations already going on? So here's the thing.

A couple of different points. One, subreddits that are massive have massive eyeballs. So, you know, the more attention you're drawing to your posts, the more likely to have a mixed reaction to all of that. So right off the bat, I would probably pick some of the smaller subreddits, the smaller topics.

you know, to kind of engage with and test with and start to get my feet into. You might also like, if you're not quite sure how it's going, pick threads that are like over 24 hours old, things that are a little further down the list. People aren't really, you know, seeing it as much because it allows you to start getting some comments in that subreddit.

It allows you to start engaging, but not where you're the center of attention or you're one of the top or the first comments, right? When you do start to comment more, I would probably engage on other people's threads before putting my own thread. And the reason being the same exposure, right? When you put a post in that subreddit as a fresh new post,

Everyone is seeing it. They're all looking at it. It's new. The moderators, everyone, all attention is on that post for a little bit. And marketers love that, but there's a warning that comes with that. Keep going. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And so it's like, you want to make sure that you have it right. Impressions are made constantly.

quickly. And the last thing you want to do is have an impression where everybody now views you as some kind of a spammer or some kind of a aggressive marketer or somebody who, you know, jumped in too quickly or didn't know enough. And, you know, some of the other things I would tell you when you're engaging and when you're posting, don't be lazy. Like Reddit says this all the time, like that was lazy. Don't be lazy. And you'll see this a lot. And what it means is

"Hey, I have a social media account and I want it to do better. Can you help me?" Well, what's that mean? We're not here just to like, you know, appease you and give you everything, right? Come with the real question. I have an account that's this large, that's been doing this and it's in this space and I'm trying to accomplish this and I've been incorporating these strategies and I'm noticing this outcome I'd like to, you know, when I do that, I'm going to get a lot more comments than when I just throw out a lazy question because I want some help from some people.

Same thing with your reactions and your comments. Coming in and saying, that sounds good. Great job. You know, those are not the type of comments that Reddit is really fostered around. It's, I'm going to take a moment and respond. And in fact, I will tell you a lot of the comments that I get that are the engaging ones are the ones where somebody's writing like eight or nine paragraphs.

of a response, like deeply, deeply going into it. When you get a comment like that, that comes back on yours, like, oh, well, I was looking at that electric vehicle, but I was concerned about the mileage and I wasn't quite sure about, you know, whether the battery would last. And then they write like a three or four paragraph response on the battery and how the mileage works and everything. And you go, oh,

nothing, that's not, that's not respectful, right? You need to respond back. Somebody who's taken the time to tell you all this and you just looked at them like in real life, that they just told you all this and you just, well, and in that case, I think it would be a thank you so much. You've given me a lot of things to think about. That would be an appropriate response, right? Yeah. Yeah. You could totally say that. Thank you so much.

Or you could say, thank you so much. I never really understood how the battery life impacted the distance like that. It's very interesting to see how the voltage doesn't necessarily apply to the mileage so much as how...

you're running the device overall. This is really intriguing and I'm going to have to consider this more when I start making a purchase. Thank you very much. Yeah. Let's talk about when someone slams you because it's going to happen probably. How do we respond to that kind of situation? So in general, I would say don't be defensive, right? Don't be, it's kind of like the whole like, look, don't start the fight, but don't lose the fight type thing, right? It's like you don't necessarily want to immediately get defensive.

Right. That's normally a sign that you're losing an argument. Right. In real life, the same way. If somebody comes to you and they are critical of you, a lot of times in life, a quick apology is the fastest way. I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to come off like that. I genuinely wasn't my attempt.

I apologize, I'll make sure I do better in the future. - I love it. - Right? Those type of things really allow you to move forward. Taking a stand and arguing and debating really splits the entire community around you, right? Some people are like, "Oh yeah, she's right," you know, or, "Oh yeah, he's right, he said this and that, and he's accurate," or, and somebody else is gonna be like, "Nope, not right." So now you've divided the audience on you and that's an impression that they're gonna take.

However, people don't get divided on you being like, I'm sorry. Right. They just go, OK, mistakes made. We're all human. Move on. Right. So I think that don't be defensive. Also, don't leave conversations unending like it's like a real life thing like you can't.

have a conversation with somebody and then they respond to you and you don't say anything to close the loop and you just kind of walk away. That's another thing that doesn't do well. So don't be lazy. Don't be defensive. Don't ghost people. You know, again, what you would think about in a social community is so applicable to how you should act when you're in a community on Reddit.

What about promotional? At what point is it okay to be promotional? I mean, I can discern what I think the answer would be, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a feeling out phase, right? It's definitely like seeing what other people do. I used to work with a company called Purple, which does mattresses, right? And so Purple Mattresses, there's a mattress subreddit that

Absolutely 100% does not want any brands to post there. It's one of the rules and everything. So we would interact at first. And what we would say is we would just answer questions, right? We wouldn't try to sell anything. We wouldn't try to, we just answer questions. At a certain point, I reached out to the moderator of that community and said, hey, we're noticing people are asking us for stuff.

"Is it all right if we respond in this way?" And they were like, "You know what? "Yeah, that's fine." And they actually changed the rules on the entire subreddit and allowed brands in because of the way we were interacting on the subreddit, right? And we even did like a partnership with them. So there's ways that you can kind of become

running contests, having your own subreddit. On your own subreddit, you can bring conversations back to your subreddit on your topic and your brand. And you can control that conversation and you can promote and you can talk about things how you want. And you can invite other people to those conversations. And those still have the potential to be in Google and to be in the LLMs.

You know, there's ways to do contests with ads to do a campaign. You can do contests with subreddits that are really geared towards specific areas. And honestly, sometimes you can be promotional right there in responses. It's very hard to go in and say, hi, I have something for sale. Would you want to buy it? It's not hard to go in and say, you've been asking me for this.

And I can give you this. Right. So it's more like set the stage for somebody to ask you for something so that you can give it to them. What about your profile? You know how on like Instagram, there's like links in bio or whatever. I mean, is it possible that on your profile there could be like if you're active in conversation, will people look at your profile and could there be links in there that would get them somewhere? Or is that not really work that way on Reddit? Yeah.

It works that way. It just doesn't work that way, if that makes sense. Like people aren't there for the user. Very rarely are people clicking through to your profile and then looking at your information. They're clicking. Everybody's anonymous for starts, right? Even the employees, everybody. So it's not like you have your first last name account, right? Now, when you create a brand, I highly suggest having a brand account.

right, that is separate from a user account. And that brand is the brand, right? And in a brand account, you can absolutely have links and people can go in and see it because they know they're dealing with a brand. And when they want to contact you, they're going to your profile because that's the nature of how brand accounts work. But as a user, a regular user account,

you really don't put any links in there. And even on a lot of the brand accounts, they don't really put a lot of links there. The idea is that Reddit is the place you go to interact. There's no place for you to send people to because now you're leaving Reddit, right? So the idea is that you're in Reddit, on Reddit, engaging on Reddit, handling your problems on Reddit, not taking people elsewhere.

This has been absolutely mind boggling and really fascinating to me. You mentioned you have a subreddit on marketing. I'd love you to mention it if people want to go check it out. And then Brent, obviously there's some people that want to connect with you. What's your preferred social?

platform. And if they want to work with you, where do you want to send them? Yeah, absolutely. So mostly I'm only on LinkedIn these days for social. That's kind of where I've landed. And if you want to reach me, it's always Brent Satoris, my first name, last name on LinkedIn. That's what it is. And also my email is my first name at my last name.com Brent.

at Satoris.com. LinkedIn or email is the easiest way to get in touch with me. And then, you know, I'm happy to discuss with anyone, you know, anyone who wants to reach out. I'm happy to discuss. I'm very big on proper fit, proper goal. If it's something that's really valuable, but if the stars align, I'm definitely open to helping people out. Yeah. And it's C-S-U-T-O-R-A-S, not, it doesn't start with an S. And then what about that subreddit? Oh, the subreddit is just, that one I'm going to leave. All right. All right. All right.

All right. We'll leave it a mystery. Maybe you could find out by connecting. If people are adventurous, I'll tell you, it's like 1.5, 1.6 million. All right, cool. Brent, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights with us today. Thank you for having me, man. I really enjoy talking about Reddit. I really enjoy like opening the door for other people because I just really feel like, you know, people are missing out on it. So the more people that I can open their eyes to the community, I feel like it's a blessing. So I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about it.

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com slash 639.

New to the show? Follow us. If you've been a longtime listener, would you let your friends know about this show? I'm at Stelzner on Facebook, at Stelzner on LinkedIn, at Mike underscore Stelzner on X. If you want to tag me, you don't have to tag me. Just let them know about the show. That'd be amazing. And do check out our other shows, the AI Explored podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week.

I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. Catch you next time. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner. Make 2025 your best year ever. Grab your discount tickets to Social Media Marketing World right now by visiting socialmediamarketingworld.info.