How to Build and Grow Community on Reddit

Reddit has emerged as a leading platform for building communities. It’s a popular social platform with about 1.2 billion monthly active users and about 100 million daily users.

If you wish to get reach and visibility for your brand, engage with audience - Reddit is the place to be. Most of the members are between 18-34 year olds, are tech savvy and consider themselves as early adopters.

In this guide, we’ll talk about building a community on Reddit and growing it organically. Each step is important, and I strongly advise you to not skip any.

Step 1: Choose a laser-focused niche

We have been building online communities (not necessarily on Reddit) for over 20 years. A strong factor that determines the success of a community is its focus on a niche. Here are a few tips to pick your community niche -

1. Find similar communities on Reddit that are popular

2. Find pain-points shared by your target users

3. Pick a niche you deeply care about and relevant to your business or brand.

For example, you may find that /r/SaaS or /r/marketing are already popular ‘generic’ niche. Building another subreddit to cater to the wider audience won’t cut it.

Instead, think about “First 100 SaaS Customers” - a nano-niche subreddit dedicated to helping SaaS founders get their first 100 customers.

This will help you attract the right kind of audience early on - and establish your authority in the niche quickly.

Step 2: Setup your subreddit for success

Once you have finalised a nano-niche for your Reddit community, it’s time to find a unique and relevant subreddit slug for your community.

In our case, we could pick: r/SaaS100Customers or r/SaaS100 depending upon availability.

Tip: Try to include the main keywords in your subreddit’s slug / name. It drastically improves the discoverability of your subreddit when users search for it.

Description: The description of your subreddit must convey the value proposition in 150 characters. For example -

Community of SaaS founders looking to acquire first 100 customers. Actionable tips, material and case studies shared by founders

Visual Branding: Upload a 1920×384 pixel banner along with 256×256 icon. Pick the colors that go with your brand. Visual identity of your community is important to attract new members.

Rules: Set between 5-7 simple rules that new members must follow. Cover spam, self promos, harassment etc. Enable automoderator to flag or remove violators.

Step 3: Seed high-quality, painkiller content

When starting a new community, keep razor-sharp focus on building high-quality, painkiller content.

There are four content pillars -

1. Question prompts: Invite stories and tips

2. Case studies: Break down real wins, fails. Real stories attract members

3. AMA threads: Bring experts in your niche. This should be a monthly ritual.

4. Resource lists: Curated tools, templates, news - depending upon your niche

Posting Time:

It essential to choose posting times when your audience is active on Reddit. In general, 8AM - 11AM (ET) if your audience is US based works best because it hits the lunch break on both coasts. People love to browse and search on Reddit during these times.

Step 4: Spark engagement

From our experience - posts with numbers in the title attract attention from users. For example:

• 132% growth with this simple hack

Works better than the title -

• How we got sustained growth with a simple technique

If someone posts a comment - be the first to acknowledge it and thank them. It shows that the Reddit is active and has the attention of the moderators / owners.

Avoid any kind of negativity (yeah, Reddit is famous for it) in the early days of building your community on Reddit. It doesn’t work well with users.

Instead, encourage them to share thoughts. End your comments with questions or statements that result into more replies.

Use @mention : Reddit allows tagging members. Don’t overuse it to tag members; but you can use it to attract attention of the regular users who’ve joined your subreddit.

Micro Contests : We are a big fan of small, healthy contests. For example, a simple context such as - Share your desktop setup and the coolest one wins $25 cloud credit - can attract a TON of replies from your members.

This hack builds engagement, gets users excited and you can drive the user-enterest with really low budget.

Step 5: Moderate proactively

Reddit is notorious for negativity and trolling. It’s therefore important to keep your subreddit clean through proactive moderation.

Use automoderator rules to:

• Remove posts with 2+ links

• Filter banned keywords

• Auto-flag posts from new accounts with karma < 10.

When your subreddit is new, it’s important to add a human message that explains why the post was removed. Redditors appreciate the transparency.

Step 6: Track the right metrics

We’ve talked about the KPIs for Community. We recommend tracking the following KPIs to have a clear idea of how the community is growing.

1. Daily Active Users (DAU) - Shows core engagement. Aim for ~10% of total members.

2. Post to Comment Ratio: Shows the depth of discussions. Aim for ~10-15 per post.

3. Subscriber Growth Rate: Indicates overall growth of community. Aim for >5% monthly

Do not overwhelm yourself by tracking multiple KPIs. Above 3 KPIs are more than sufficient to know if you are on the right path to build a thriving community on Reddit.

Step 7: Cross-promote without spam

In order to keep growing your subreddit, you may cross promote your subreddit. You may collaborate with mods from other subreddits, do cross promotional posts; but without spamming.

The general rule is to create value for your target members and then inform them about the network you are building on Reddit and the helpful content your community is creating.

Additional channels to promote your subreddit-

• Email lists: Leverage email lists to promote your subreddit

• Existing customers: Get your existing customers to participate in your subreddit

• Push notifications: Use browser-based push notification systems to direct your users to threads on your subreddit.

Step 8: Pros and cons of building community on Reddit

It’s important to be aware of the pros and cons of building a community on Subreddit. Community building takes time and it’s important to understand what you are getting into before you make the investment into community building.

Pro:

• Instant reach. Reddit has huge base of active users

• Organic discovery of your content

Cons:

• No ownership of member data. You can’t mass-email your users

• SEO advantage benefits Reddit, not your business

• Interaction limited to “Discussions”. No other ways to keep users engaged

• Limited monetization. You must play by the strict rules Reddit imposes

• High risk: A policy change can get you banned from Reddit altogether. Some other mod can ban you - and you’ll lose access to your own community.

A Better Way to Build an “Owned” Community

While Reddit is good; it’s not the ‘best’ option to build a community that you own. It’s one of the reasons that dedicated community platforms like Jatra (this platform) exist. With platform like Jatra you can -

1. Own 100% of your member data

2. Have complete control over your community

3. Stay unaffected by algorithmic changes and policy updates

4. Engage users with Discussions, Articles, Webinars, Quizzes, Chats, Jobs and more

5. Eliminate the platform risk

6. Monetize your community the way you want

7. Get 100% of the SEO benefit

…and more. If you are looking to build a community, let us know through comments. We hope you found this article helpful. If you did - please like it and share it on social media.

Thank you!