 Coming up with new content ideas on a regular basis can be very difficult Today I'm going to talk about how you can transform that process using reddit So like I said, it's it's it's hard to regularly come up with ideas for your content marketing campaigns it's even harder sometimes to then take those ideas and then transform them into actually successful campaigns and Then it can sometimes be even harder still to get buy-in from your bosses from your teams from your clients For those content ideas, especially if you're trying to do something new right that hasn't been proven in the past Luckily, there are these online forums where people on the internet have come together to Discuss different topics to post different types of content and we can use those to find amazing content Reddit right now is the biggest and in my opinion the best forum on the internet Which follows that reddit is currently an amazing place to find content and potentially the biggest and best place to find content The goal is by the end of the next 15 minutes here that you'll be able to Understand why reddit is the king of forums on the internet right now Why it's an amazing place to find content what tools you can use to then find Content ideas on reddit and then how to transform those ideas into actual actionable campaigns But quick history behind forums. It's it's good to understand how we got here where reddit came from a Long time ago dinosaur age in internet terms. We had IRC That grew up a little became message boards around dedicated topics Message boards became more formal with slash dot and then dig and now we've got reddit and Reddit as ran mentioned earlier today is a really big deal now It's the number eight most popular website on the internet as a whole according to its Alexa ranking and Just in January of this year alone. It saw 274 million unique visitors And a lot of those people are coming back on a very very regular basis So it is seeing billions of clicks and visits every year. In fact just by a show of hands. How many of you have used reddit before? Almost everybody how many of you have used reddit in the last like 24 hours Almost the same hands. How many of you are using reddit right now? Reddit reddit is a big deal. So what is it that makes it so attractive and addictive? Why do people keep coming back to it? Well, there's a couple of key features that we'll be able to break down here These key features are again what makes reddit so attractive, but then also what makes it so good for us as marketers First key feature is something called subreddits These are smaller forums within reddit that are dedicated to a particular topic for example There is the movies subreddit You might go here if you want to post a discussion about a recent film or if you want to read Reviews about a film or if you want to see the latest trailer or poster There's the food subreddit Which is if you like to take pictures of your food if you like to look at pictures of food This is like heaven for you, but things get even more granular from there There is there is a subreddit for just about everything under the Sun for example This is old people Facebook Old people Facebook is a subreddit dedicated to the funny things that grandparents and aunts and uncles will post on Social media. Here's a couple examples of those posts first We got Charles. He posted Kmart's Facebook page and says Carol's cat died yesterday I'm sure Kmart had a little huddle about this. What do we do? We a counseling place now Kmart did a great job said we are so sorry to hear that Charles. We love kiddies so much. They truly become a part of the family Vincent I'm assuming one of Charles's friends sees this and decides to get in he says Earl's guinea pig died last year another example Jean post on subarrow's Corporate page says if you notice I never say much. I keep my feelings to myself I'm sure they loved hearing that Their their social team was on the ball. They say tell us more Jean Jean says I said enough Lastly Joel not not the Joel it just spilled. Hopefully Joel posted to old country buffets page. He's just really hungry. He wants some corn He's probably struggling with voice commands and voice search and he says order corn When he doesn't get a response, he tries again order corn Hello. Hello. Can I speak to a real person? Excuse me. Please order corn He slowly descends into despair as he realizes no corn will be had Another example of a kind of more niche subreddit shower thoughts This is dedicated to those epiphanies that you'll have when you're getting ready in the morning I like this one a lot. It says if I see Google in a show or movie, I think nothing of it But if I see being I know it's product placement This one says there should be a millennial addition of monopoly where you just walk around the board paying rent Never able to buy anything There really is a subreddit for just about everything under the Sun Which is incredibly valuable for us as marketers because we're always looking to try to gather data and gather evidence for our target market And on reddit people are self Segregating breaking themselves up into different interest groups in these different subreddits another key feature discussion threads Basically people can comment on content and then they can comment on comments, etc What this allows is you can have a focus group around content that you haven't even created You can find a piece of content that you like on reddit and go and read through the comments And you can see if people had negative feedback on it if they really liked it Maybe sometimes they have ideas for other types of content that they think would perform really well There's upvoting and downvoting and this is this is great when I was mentioning having a hard time getting buy-in from bosses Upvoting and downvoting really helps that because what you can do is And for those that don't know on reddit if you like something you upvote it if you don't like it you downvote it And what you can do is you can look at the most upvoted content that has already been validated Sometimes by tens of thousands of people but who have upvoted it So there's already validation built in and those upvotes then contribute to another reddit feature, which is rankings The top content automatically rises and becomes more visible The way rankings are determined in reddit is a combination of the number of upvotes Compared to the number of downvotes over a certain period of time and if you get enough upvotes in that period of time That content may make it to the front page and the front page is just an amalgamation of all of the top content from the most popular subreddits Usually these subreddits that are sending things to the front page are bigger more popular subreddits So the food subreddit I mentioned before has over 12 million subscribers and that is most often what you'll see on the front page There's also some rules of reddit that are important to understand the more you can understand these the more you'll understand Why you see the type of content that you do on reddit. So here is a breakdown of the most important rules the first is no spam The second is no vote manipulation and while people still manipulate votes on reddit for sure This is important because it means that Most likely when you're seeing upvotes on something those are real people behind those numbers It's not something that's been faked Each subreddit has its own rules for example The biggest subreddit around interpreting visualizing discussing data. It's called data is beautiful They have a rule where you can only post things about politics on Thursdays That's just the unlucky day for that sub The that's that's the only time that you can post content about that So if you're looking for political content, you you won't find it on most of the other days something to keep in mind But what does all of this mean for us? How do we take these features and then get content ideas? Well, that is the golden question How do we find golden content ideas on reddit? Well, the first step is to become an active user and you don't need to use it every day You don't need to you know become a reddit super user by any means But you need to use it enough so that you start to understand the environment the culture around the Reddit community what different reddit users care about The next step is to master reddit's search function reddit has a search bar. It's pretty mediocre It doesn't do a great job of delivering results But you can drill down in your searches by using search parameters You can search by author so if you have a particular user that's posted really good content in the past You can look at just that user's content You can search by website So if you're trying to do something around sports, you can look at what has been the most upvoted from ESPN comm You can then sort the results that you get so for example, you can sort by top content So the most upvoted content within my search the newest content or the content that's received the most discussion the most comments Right, you can also limit your results to different amounts of time. You can do the past hour past 24 hours past year You can also limit results to a particular subreddit and this is useful because So I was doing a campaign for a restaurant We wanted to do something around chicken if I just typed in chicken I'd probably get results of people calling each other chickens and things like that if I limit it just to the food subreddit Then I can be sure that I'm going to be looking at the top content that actually has to do with food You can filter subreddits So if you just want to look at all of the content that has been posted under a particular topic You can go in and you can look at the top content from that subreddit the most controversial which sometimes is valuable This just means the ones that get a lot of upvotes and a lot of downvotes You can also look at it based off of time based off of what's going up. What's going down? But what has been most valuable for us at go fish digital in terms of a combination of these different features that? MVF most valuable filter combo has been a combination of looking at the top content from a particular subreddit Subreddit that matches our topic over the past month The reason you want to put the past month in there is that if you go too long You might get things that have been played out You know like you might get like Harlem Shake videos or things like that If you're just looking at the past month Then you'll be able to get things that are more recent. Maybe you haven't played out as much yet Now some examples of how to take all of this and apply it case study one This is an example of taking the most popular subreddits and then Taking the the the best content from those and transforming it into something for one of our clients Our client was a software provider. They provided it's an anonymous feedback tool for corporate environments And they needed backlinks and social shares who doesn't right? Our reddit find was that data is beautiful subreddit that I mentioned earlier This was always getting a lot of upvotes this subreddit It was frequently on the front page a lot of people like to tweet the stuff out that they found there So what we did was we looked at the top content is shared a lot of similarities The top post from Wednesday was very similar top post from Thursday They all had kind of the same graph set up a lot of them had the same kind of title structure And so we took that and we modeled it for our own data We did a survey about how people value anonymity online Essentially people do they value anonymity online, but we modeled the graphs that we saw the graph formats We looked at the title structures so that every graph had a title that pulled out some kind of juicy bit from the statistics And this performed really well In fact, you can see here somebody took it and posted it on reddit and it got over 4,000 upvotes itself And it did really well after that as well. It got over 600 links Obviously not all of them were perfect quality, but still over 600 links and over 7,000 social shares another example this is a this is an example of Looking at a top content top content around a particular idea or a particular topic not necessarily within a subreddit The client here was a limo and shuttling company potentially kind of boring. So we turned to reddit our need here was backlinks everybody needs backlinks and Our find on reddit was presidential limo's people really like to post content about presidential limo's has bulletproof glass Has like its own oxygen tank in there. It's built like a tank It really is at least the new ones are and so we took that concept found the ones that Found the presidential limo posts that were most upvoted and then we created our own content from it And the result was a morphing gif of presidential limo's over the years and here's that gif Basically, it shows things going from pretty average typical nice cars Back in the the 50s and 60s and 70s and then slowly transforming into the big behemoth tanks that we have today And people really like this people liked it on social media people liked it at different reporting outlets We got multiple domain authority 90 plus links from this and then on top of that even though it wasn't necessarily part of our goals We got social shares as well Another case study. This is an example of why it's important to be relatively active on reddit If you do want to use it as a source for content ideas The client here was a jeweler on a large online jeweler They needed again backlinks and brand exposure and our find was this thing called the hydraulic press channel Hydraulic press channel was on the front page pretty much every week for about two months Earlier last year Basically, it's this guy in Finland and he owns a machine shop and he takes things like watermelons and Computers and he sticks them in his hydraulic press and he smashes them and people love it They upvote it to heaven. That's just like an amazing thing I found his email address and I sent him an email and I said hey If we get you a really big diamond like one that could show up on film Will you smash it and Then make sure that you mention that our jeweler client sent it to you And then make sure you include a link to the our jeweler client in the description And if any reporters reach out to you to ask about it make sure that you mention where it came from and he said yes So the result was a diamond crushing video Here's a here's a small snippet of that So they say that diamonds are forever, but how long? It was a big diamond. It wasn't it wasn't a very nice diamond. Don't be too worried. It wasn't that nice of a diamond, but it was big I'm pretty sure he practiced that they say the diamonds are forever, but how long for a really long time before he made the video It was it was one of those popular comments on reddit about the video actually was about that that comment he made This just blew up. It was the number one video on youtube for over 24 hours It had 10 and a half million views it got coverage from almost every single news outlet including the weather channel Weather channel decided to talk about crushing diamonds And and we got some bonus links just throwing some bonus links there, too It was awesome. We have a new standard now that content has to be diamond crushing has to be diamond crushing content Reddit is powerful Reddit is so powerful because you get so many people going there on a regular basis and you have live data that you can constantly draw from So that things can be validated ideas can be validated You can have focus groups in the comments long before you ever take that content for approval by a client by a boss by your team Now there are some limitations of reddit to keep in mind Reddit data is skewed And it's definitely not the end of the world But it's definitely something that you're going to want to be aware of the Pew Research Center did a study about reddit And here are some of their findings Reddit is overwhelmingly male Like two to one ratio that has been changing recently There's been more females joining, but it's still right now for the time being overwhelmingly male It's overwhelmingly young 64 percent are in the 19 to 29 year old range It's more educated than the typical demographic 42 percent have a college degree or more 18 percent have high school or less The rest are still in college or dropped out of college. So it's a it's a pretty highly educated demographic It's very white 70 percent white and Hispanic and then it's also very liberal It's a 81 to 19 split between liberal moderate to conservative now with this being said if you're trying to build a campaign of around like Women's beauty products or something like that. There is a subreddit for that, right? Even though 33 percent of reddit's user base is female Maybe you don't want to look at all of reddit, but you can look at a particular subreddit and that's still extremely valuable So to recap become an active user Master the search function again, there's a lot of parameters there. You can get really tricky with it But that's how you bring those good ideas to the top Once you find those good ideas model and riff off of them Right take take it take the presidential limo pictures that have been posted and think of how you can just polish it a little bit How you can one up it a little bit And then remember reddit's limits The data is skewed keep that in mind and you'll still find great ideas and you'll be well on your way to creating top Diamond crushing content. Thank you