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Subreddits as market research

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Twitter, Facebook, Google Ads – these are all platforms many of us use to promote our product, but did you know that there is a site that you can get just as much visibility in addition to feedback on your product..at no cost? Enter Reddit – one of most trafficked websites on the entire web. I’ve been using Reddit recently to test out ideas amongst audiences that self-identify interests. Facebook and Twitter ads are expensive. Reddit lets you do topic oriented targeting. Reddit

HOW TO START USING REDDIT

The goal on Reddit is to get your link to be voted up. The more votes a link gets, the more likely it will appear on a subreddits homepage. The longer the link is on the subreddits homepage, the greater the social reach. For every subreddit homepage a link is on, the more likely that a user’s default homepage will also have the link.

Subreddits publicly state how many users are registered. They also say how many people are looking at content on the subreddit at any moment. This means, you can roughly estimate the social reach your link may have. For example, the /r/learnprogramming subreddit may have 600,000 subscribed users. Among these subscribed users, 500 to 5000 people may be looking at the subreddit at any moment.

When you circulate a link on Facebook or Twitter, you can only reachyour friends. Facebook’s algorithm restricts who can see posts. Twitter is also limited. Twitter posts will quickly get buried in the newest content. The exposure your content actually receives is very limited. Your reach is directly correlated to the amount of money you spend. The less money you spend, the less exposure you get. You can throttle your ad spend, by creating a daily cap, but this brings up the algorithmic issue with opaque content circulation.

The sponsored content platforms resolve this issue by creating artificially positioned posts. The posts are targeted based on the metrics offered by the social network. Twitter’s sponsored content buyers can target based on a user’s twitter followers. For example, in trying to reach tech savvy users, you can target people who follow TechCrunch or HackerNews. Facebook’s ad network operates by allowing ad buyers to target specific demographic metrics.

Reddit allows you to do this effectively for free. The posts you put up are subject to the same algorithmic chance as all other posts. There is no prefered weighting on new links. You can use the traditional methods of Reddit to gain visibility for your links. For each vote that your link gets, the higher it rises in the list ranking. By achieving a higher ranking, your link will sustain is ranking in the subreddit. The sustained ranking directly translates to quantifiable social reach. In most cases, this means real traffic driven to your site.

Compared to a sponsored post or paid ad campaign on Facebook or Twitter, the Reddit approach allows for your link to go through a natural progression. Your link will grow and die based on the communities’ genuine interest. This means that you will not prematurely end your campaign based on your campaign budget size.

TRACKING RESULTS

Reddit doesn’t have pretty data analysis tools for understanding a links social reach. You can estimate the effectiveness of your links through the subreddits public user presence numbers. As mentioned above, subreddits publicly share their subscriber and currently active user numbers. You can contrast this data against the positioning of your link, the length in which the link was visible, and the ranking that it received. If you wanted to get very detailed, you could do a study of the subreddit before launching your link and roughly estimate the lifespan of a link on the homepage.

You can combine this value with responses from Google Analytics. If you tag your link with a query parameter or ref code, you can identify the traffic generated from the Reddit links. By using ref query parameters, Google Analytics will register the traffic as a unique endpoint. This will allow you to identify the differences between campaigns you may run to the same landing page.

The Reddit algorithm increases visibility of links with early votes. To help your link gain visibility, you can coordinate upvotes by circulating your Reddit posting amongst friends. By having a few initial upvotes, your post will gain the visibility it needs to gain natural traction in any community. Without an initial push, your link will most likely go unrecognized by the greater community. The link circulation practice helps your link get out of the “New” posts page and get onto the lower part of the subreddits front page.

Analyzing user behavior with Google Analytics

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I ran a brief experiment on my single ‘piece’ page this week. I used the news coverage on the Brooklyn Bridge White Flag incident as a catalyst topic. I created a quick location page for the Brooklyn Bridge, a ‘piece’ page for the White Flag, and a ‘artist’ page for the unknown group. I added an image, tagged the address, and put together the page. It looked like this:

I noticed the Brooklyn Bridge White Flag topic trending in the /r/nyc group. I noticed after a Google search that many news outlets were writing articles on the topic. I gathered the links and submitted them as individual “comments” to the post. This is a bit of an experiment to see whether having the press coverage on a piece is valuable. I dont actually have a function for this, so the test method is the comment submission.

After a day, the reception to the link was positive. No one commented on the Brooklyn Bridge White Flag page and no one commented on the Reddit submission link. Currently, the Reddit posting has a 86% upvote rating with 7 votes

Google Analytics shows the traffic shows me that I had 159 visitors as of two days ago. About 50 visits are a result of the Reddit posting. Im surprised to see that the page views of visitors is reflective of a ‘exploring’ visitor. The bounce rate of people coming to the Brooklyn Bridge White Flag page is high, but this is normal for Reddit links.

The pages viewed on the day I posted the Brooklyn Bridge White Flag link shows that Brooklyn Bridge White Flag page viewers did view multiple pages. Im surprised by the length of time the visitors stayed on the page. The average was 43 seconds, showing that users did read some of the page before leaving. There is very little content on the page, so this is a sign of interest.

Based on the on-site behavior, I gather people are interested in the service. Rather then having a high bounce rate (+80%), a number of people tried to visit other parts of the site. The highest trafficked page, after the Brooklyn Bridge White Flag page, was the graffiti index page. The best way to get to that page is the top navigation link or the back button at the end of the Brooklyn Bridge White Flag page. If the ‘back’ button was the driver, Im not sure if this is people trying to get back to Reddit, or whether they intended to go to the graffiti index page.

I could better track my pages to know the exact cause. For now, no one is registering and commenting. This is okay because the website is still error prone. I am refining this user flow. I’ll run an experiment to see if I can get visitors to register.

Using subreddits for user research

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I have been using Reddit.com’s subreddits to get feedback about my ideas. I tried to go through Google Adsense to set up a campaign, but realized I dont like the way they promise a ‘segment’. I also looked at Facebook, but I am afraid I misunderstand my potential constituents.

On Reddit, people collect in topic oriented sub-groups. The sub-groups are a collection of people who share links about a single topic. As a result of this, you can safely assume the preferences of the group. These are called subreddits.

The subreddits are great for experimenting with ideas. The total number of subreddit followers is public knowledge. At any one moment, the subreddits also show how many people are logged in. As a result, you can easily gain insight on how many people your links are reaching.

I have been experimenting with asking the graffiti oriented subreddits about my idea. Initially, I was targeting the /r/graffiti subreddit because it was the biggest. I have tried to use surveys to collect feedback and email addresses, but never got more than 10 responses.

Today, I decided to target the /r/streetart subreddit. I used the format of post title as a question and post description with instructions. The instructions say “upvote” if you agree with the question. This format is giving me a healthy balance of up and down votes.

/r/streetart is a significantly smaller group, but I am getting much more user feedback. /r/graffiti is approximately 55,000 subscribers and /r/streetart is about 17,000. I believe this is because I am competing less for visible real estate. I also believe this may be because people who like /r/streetart may be more receptive to my question.