This week, one of our team members, Philip Mastroianni shared with the IMI team some insight into Reddit.com, a highly effective social news and entertainment website. Reddit, familiar to many of us already, has a bulletin board system where users submit content, can vote up or down a post, and comment on many different subtopics.

So why is Reddit still a worthwhile social site? As of 2012, Reddit has about 37 billion page views, 400 million unique visits, 30 million posts, and 4.4 million page views. The site got up to 1.6 million unique visits in one day. In 2011, Reddit received a Quantcast US rank of 66 (out of all the sites on the web), and an Alexa US rank of 43.

Popular Reddit Terms

Despite its plain interface, Reddit is a sophisticated site with its own lingo. Some commonly used Reddit terms are listed below:

OP: Original Poster

“According to the OP, the image was taken from The New York Times“.

TIL: Today I learned…

“TIL that taxonomically, modern-day birds aren’t just descended from dinosaurs, but are considered to BE dinosaurs“.

DAE: Does anyone else…

“DAE think that Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street should have their own full-length sitcom?”

IAmA: I am a….

“IAmA Police Officer in Arizona, AMA”

AMA: Ask me anything.

“I have had 2 ACL reconstructions. AMA.“

TL;DR: Too Long; Didn’t Read

“[After a long, detailed story] TL;DR I went to Vegas, found a monkey in my hotel room, and lived ‘The Hangover’ in real life.“

FTFY: Fixed that for you.

Term used when someone makes a change to another user’s post or image, often with humorous results.

Famous People Who Use Ask Me Anything on Reddit

President Barack Obama



Larry King



Molly Ringwald



Bill Gates



Arnold Schwarzenegger

(Who also happens to answer questions

in r/fitness from time to time)

(Who also happens to answer questions in r/fitness from time to time)

Zach Braff



Jimmy Kimmel



Ron Paul



Stephen Colbert



Bear Grylls



Firefox UX Design Team



Mars Curiosity Rover engineers and scientists

Ask Me Anything – Upcoming Chats

98 Degrees (Band)

Charlie Rose (Talk show host)

Before posting something on Reddit, you want to make sure that you post it in the right category. The more people that “upvote” your post, the better chance it has at reaching more viewers. Some of the most popular and active categories are listed below:

What is Karma on Reddit?

Karma reflects how much good the user has done for the Reddit community. The best way to gain karma is to submit links that other people like and vote for, though you won’t get karma for self promoted posts. So, what can you do with the Karma you receive on Reddit? Nothing, but with more Karma, you gain some credibility with other users.

Top tips to get Karma:

Cat pics … and more cat pics

Random Wikipedia article and /r/TIL

Random famous person and random quote

Post to /r/atheism

Funny GIF files (nostalgia can work)

Original meme content

Bad Parking Job Pictures

Reposts (wait 2-4 weeks)

The Reddit site categorizes topics very effectively and prioritizes stories by how many upvotes they receive. This distinguishes them from Facebook or Twitter. For internet marketing news, for example, you may want to check out these subreddits:

/r/seo

/r/google

/r/wordpress

/r/facebook

/r/twitter

/r/adwords

/r/gmarketing (guerilla marketing)

Content Promotion on Reddit

With so many people using Reddit every day, it is a great way to promote interesting content. For example, let’s say you have an infographic you want to share. There is an infographic category that you can share it in. We recommend interacting with a community and commenting and voting up other members’ posts besides just sharing your own. Like anything, the better the content is, the more it will get shared. For example, pictures with funny text on them, or memes, do really well on Reddit.

As Philip explained in his presentation, Reddit is a great site and when used regularly, can be an effective source for content promotion. What has been your experience using Reddit? Leave a comment below.