According to BIOTIONARY, Reddit is a social news aggregator that was founded in 2005 and is now one of the most visited sites on the internet. Millions of users from all over the world publish a large amount of content every day in the form of links, videos, images, text contributions or surveys. The term “Reddit” is a combination of the verbs ‘read’ and ‘edit’ (German: to write).
The story of Reddit becoming an opinion maker
Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005. At that time, the founders created many fake accounts within a very short time in order to achieve more traffic by means of link building. Due to its rapid success, Reddit was bought by Condé-Nast-Verlag for US $ 20 million in 2006 in order to continue to ensure the availability of the website. In September 2011, the website reached 1.6 billion views, after which the website was separated from Condé-Nast-Verlag and continued as reddit.inc. Reddit is one of the 20 strongest websites in the world today and has several million users every day. Reddit calls itself the home page of the Internet (Frontpage of the World Wide Web).
How does Reddit work?
Users from over 190 countries post a lot of content and links every day. Registered users (Redditors) can create posts and set references that they can share in numerous communities (so-called subreddits). An interesting post can receive so-called karma points if other Redditors recommend or comment on it. These points represent the reputation of a user is in Reddit. The FrontPage automatically lists the Topbeiträge from all Subreddits on. These are often comments on topics such as music, film or humor, but politics, technology, finance and other areas are also popular topics for discussion.
In contrast to a forum, the posts are not sorted chronologically according to the posting date, but according to a rating system. In this way, users can rate the contributions and comments with “up” (if they like) and “down” (if they don’t). This contribution score is calculated from the difference between positive and negative ratings and then determines the position in the subreddit. If this is correspondingly large, it can appear as a top post on the front page.
Reddit: Netiquette
Registered users can create subreddits on various topics and set up rules, while others as moderators enforce the existing forum rules in the subreddit. Reddit has a netiquette (called Reddiquette) and page guidelines, whereby each subreddit can also set its own rules about the contributions allowed. Moderators have the right to delete comments and exclude annoying users from the group if they violate the forum rules.
The Reddiquette includes the following rules, among others:
- Post original source of content
- Adequate and polite basis for discussion
- Avoid duplicate posts
- Don’t post fake news
- Post a contribution in the appropriate community
- Don’t feed the troll
Importance for SEO
Due to its great success (number of daily users), Reddit has also come into focus for online marketing. For example, distributing certain viral content using Reddit is a popular marketing tool to generate traffic and attention. However, obvious advertising is immediately uncovered by the users and rated negatively, since the communities are usually very skeptical of such texts and links. Posts in certain subreddits can still lead to higher traffic even though they are not listed on the frontpage. So a thousand page views (page impressions) possible, depending on the sorting of the contributions and frequency of the corresponding subreddis.
Conclusion: Reddit as a starting point for viral campaigns
For traffic generation while there are more efficient methods than Reddit, but it can be used as complement to other marketing activities on channels such as Facebook and Twitter are being used successfully. Because users give their unfiltered opinions and thoughts here, making it ideal for a company’s market research. In addition, it is also suitable for creating content due to the numerous ideas. These topics also have the potential to go viral. In principle, an increase in traffic for certain marketing goals is also possible with Reddit, but here the content should be tailored exactly to the specific target group be tailored.
