Reddit’s rise signals the dawn of a new era
Opinion
As more people are discovering Reddit through citations in AI-generated search, does adland truly have the right mindset to create for this vastly different social channel?
The game is changing. Again.
Make no mistake. We are entering a new age of social media marketing. And I don’t think we can even call it ‘social media marketing’ anymore.
Reddit is now the fourth most-visited social platform in the UK. A fact that demonstrates the increased yearning for human opinion and connection in a world hurtling towards the synthetic. For marketers, it brings to the fore yet another string to add to our impossibly large bows.
A lot of the industry has only just started to feel like they’ve mastered working with creators and scrappy, lo-fi content. Well, SURPRISE!! You’ve got to master something at the other end of the social playbook now.
I’ve heard a mix of derision and despondency over the past week, but now is not the time to deride an industry hellbent on ripping up our rulebook every three years. It is time to ask ourselves if we are equipped to succeed.
For the last decade, social has chased scale. Reddit’s rise changes that.
What works on Reddit looks far closer to customer service, community management and CRM than it does traditional social content.
It is about answering questions properly. Sharing experience and expertise. Existing as one voice among thirty replies, not the main character. This bashes wholly against what the majority of marketers have used social media for. Social success is going to be influenced by being even more granular than we have been. Humility is going to be a superpower.
We are no longer in the attention age. We are firmly in the value age.
For brands, Reddit is not a content platform. Turning up with a beautifully crafted asset that has survived twelve rounds of internal feedback and posting it into a subreddit is the digital equivalent of walking into a pub and loudly announcing your own press release. Best case, you are ignored. Worst case, you are publicly dismantled and banned.
Reddit does not reward broadcasting. It rewards contribution.
This is where the industry needs to be honest with itself. For years, agencies have said you need a “different strategy for every platform”. In practice, that has often meant the same idea sliced slightly differently. A person talking to-camera for TikTok. A more polished edit for Instagram. An article for LinkedIn. ‘Platform-first’ in words alone.
Reddit’s rise will expose whether our industry truly has the right mindset to create for different channels.
In reality, it’s plugging a gap – not replacing anything. A good Reddit strategy will complement a great creator strategy, for example. It may even offer brands an opportunity to become their own best ambassadors again. As creator-led content continues to boom, maybe the brands that will stand out are the ones that speak for themselves and offer genuine value?
If TikTok made authenticity fashionable, Reddit raises the bar to uncomfortable levels. There is nowhere to hide. No trending audio to lean on. No visual distraction. Just words, opinions and whether you actually know what you are talking about.
This is why you can’t bolt Reddit onto an existing social team and hope for the best. It requires specialist departments, specialist skills and a very different mindset.
Winning on Reddit means hiring people who are experts in their clients’ worlds, not just experts in content formats. People who can sit inside a niche, understand its language, its sensitivities and its in-jokes, and add something genuinely useful. That might be advice. It might be context. It might simply be helping someone make a better decision.
It’s why GH05T is building its own Reddit division. We’re not hiring “content” people. We’re hiring experts in our clients’ fields who have an innate ability to write for the platform and fit in with relevant niches.
The really exciting part about all of this is that the positive outcomes of succeeding on Reddit are threefold:
* Improved sentiment on a platform that is seriously influential
* Better performing media buying for high-sentiment brands
* Improved AEO and visibility across AI search
It’s worth referencing the paradox around point three. Yes, there is a movement towards more human connection that I referenced earlier, but the flip side is that more people are being driven to Reddit through citations in AI-generated search results. Google struck a deal to train its models on Reddit data almost two years ago. The platform’s visibility in results is coming to fruition.
This symbiosis between human opinion and synthetic visibility will make Reddit the next big thing for brands in online marketing.
Success will require a lot of patience. Brands that get this right are not just playing for short-term performance. They are building something far more defensible. Genuine communities with vocal advocates paired with wider visibility. Online street teams that will eventually defend, recommend and amplify them without being asked. AI-answers that will reference those contributions as valuable information.
So yes, Reddit’s rise signals a shift in platform attention. But more importantly, it should signal a shift in mindset. The scope of social media and online marketing has widened once more. Are you set up correctly?
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Joe Battimelli is co-founder and COO at GH05T