Despite what any good 50-bullet-point list of growth hacks will make you think, the ways to go about marketing aren’t endless: most of your options boil down to the simple act of selling yourself. You’re effectively turning your plucky marketing bunch into a sales team. But what if you want your business to appear more organic? What if you don’t want to feel like a robot, your product or service invading everyone’s social feed? What if you want to put yourself out there, but in a way that’s less professional and more… revealing? Honest? REAL?
If your business is riding the wave of being real and getting personal with your audience and followers, a Reddit AMA may be a cool and beneficial move to make.
As of June 2015, Reddit has managed to gather 36 million users into its open community. That’s a pretty big number!
For those that took a ten year break from the internet, Reddit is the web’s answer to an open round table. Community members discuss, teach, report on any and all topics and themes, leaving every category open for discussion, further advice, and an endless amount of personal anecdotes. If message boards and online forums were regions, Reddit would be dubbed Earth. Because it has literally everything.
Recently, one of our own writers did his own exploration of marketing on Reddit. How to Game Reddit: A Digital Marketing Exploration was our crack at it. What we found was that gaining “upvotes” (Reddit’s version of “likes”) isn’t easy. Every topic you could dream of has its own forum, called a Subreddit. There are constantly posts being made in each subreddit, sometimes reaching hundreds in a single day. And each post has an exponential number of comments being made on it. But finding a loophole for a marketer is as easy as being a little more human. Once you spend some time on the website, and learn to view the community as an insider, posting a link or a new topic will come as naturally as talking to your friends.
Now back to the AMA, or the Ask Me Anything subreddit. You can use this remarkably popular vessel to get your name out there on a mass scale, by letting the Reddit world interview you, or ask you anything. But despite how easy that sounds, you still have to do it right in order to be effective. Marketing on Reddit is going to be a trip but one that’s well worth it.
FIGURE OUT A COUPLE OF THINGS FIRST:
- what makes your company interesting?
- what do you want people to know about you?
- what message are you trying to send?
- what recent company news makes this AMA relevant?
Once you answer those questions, decide who from your team will be the one answering questions. Make sure it’s someone who’s knowledgeable in the field, prepped for anything, and has good grammar and spelling skills. You want your company to look good, no matter where you’re marketing.
Our friends at Udemy created a helpfully thorough and impressive infographic that takes a closer look at how to use Reddit AMA’s as a marketing tool. They even compare Snoop Dog to Arnold Schwarzenegger (bold move!) on the AMA front. Udemy makes it clear through numbers and statistics that letting the world ask you ANYTHING is an excellent opportunity for the right company or person. Could that be you?
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