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Advertising on Reddit? 3 things brands need to know

Stephanie Bissonnette
Stephanie Bissonnette
Length
4 min read
Date
27 June 2022

Social media channels are incredibly popular with today’s consumers and are continuing to evolve on a daily basis. When a new feature becomes available or a new platform is introduced and well received, social media giants tap into that trend. We’ve seen this done before with stories when Snap introduced them. Meta quickly followed suit, Instagram created Reels, Pinterest launched Idea pins, Clubhouse and Twitter got in on the action, and TikTok exploded.

The latest, and fastest-growing area, that these social giants are investing in is creator content. Meta plans to invest more than $1 billion in creators before the end of 2022, Snap released their partnership with Cameo earlier this year, and TikTok continues to build out tools within their Creator marketplace. The one social platform that we don’t hear about following this trend is Reddit.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Reddit, it’s a social platform that was founded in 2005. However, it wasn’t until about five years ago that Reddit revamped its self-serve advertising platform redesigning their ads interface. People go to Reddit to seek out information and become informed on a variety of topics. Those topics are categorized as communities (also known as subreddits) and the amount of communities are endless, covering a variety of topics. For example, if someone is interested in learning more about cooking you can explore hyper-specific communities related to eating on a budget or air fryer recipes. The value that Reddit brings to its users is the ability to upvote or downvote any given topic based on relevancy. The format is also more straightforward than other platforms, where most of the posts are essentially just text and conversation starters in which the community of Redditors feel comfortable enough to speak up and share their perspectives.

So why is one of the most popular social media platforms not interested in the same creator trend? Unlike other social platforms like Instagram and TikTok, Reddit follows its own path by offering a sense of authenticity to their users. On Reddit, people tap into a platform solely for information sharing, whereas a good amount of the rest of the digital landscape is made up of creators and professional content. Creator content is a huge driver of success for Instagram/TikTok style of platforms, where Reddit is quite the opposite as advice is found through anonymity. Because of that anonymity, Reddit is a place where consumers feel more comfortable actually interacting with strangers compared other social platforms.

So, what does this mean for brands looking for a potential new advertising opportunity?

1. Capture a new growth opportunity

It may come as a surprise that Reddit is the second-fastest growing social media platform (seeing double-digit growth) followed by TikTok, according to eMarketer in April 2021.

If a brand wants to grow and stay relevant to consumers, it’s critical that it is always testing new and emerging platforms. If you aren’t yet running campaigns on Reddit, it can be a major opportunity to expand and diversify your current social presence and campaigns. Consider testing out this platform to see if it works for your strategy and vision.

2. Significant untapped potential

As the following chart shows, Reddit has a highly unique and unduplicated audience when compared to other social platforms. For instance, if you advertise on Reddit, you’re reaching 65% of people who are not on Snapchat, and 69% who don’t use TikTok. Advertising on Reddit is an excellent way to diversify the types of consumers you’re reaching.

3. Using the right ad formats

Reddit offers a couple different ways to run advertising on the platform. The most common method is using promoted posts that are purchased through auction pricing. Another is a 24 hour “takeover” post, which offers even more exposure and benefits from following trends that users are searching more for on the platform at any given time. However, takeover ads also come at a higher price point.

While Reddit doesn’t collect user data in the same way other social media platforms do, there are still ways to reach consumers. Ads are targeted to users through the wide array of communities (aka subreddits) they are browsing, device, geography, and website retargeting.

When thinking about the type of targeting to leverage, you should evaluate based on your brand’s specific goals, and experiment with a mix of targeting through the media planning process. There are more than 500 hyper-specific communities on Reddit which is a major advantage when you’re trying to target unique audience segments.

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Stephanie Bissonnette