I Read It on Reddit.com

                                         

I was not one of the 542 million monthly visitors of Reddit.com in 2015. However, after recently exploring and creating an account, I may now be a monthly subscriber/visitor. For those who are similar to me, Reddit is a social media platform that allows for the Reddit community to submit posts, direct links, comments, etc. to a variety of topics. As a whole, Reddit is a form of entertainment, social news, networking site and news website as well.

After doing some research, I was surprised to hear that the social media site was created by two college students at the University of Virginia: Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005. After a funding round to get the site and company going, Reddit raised $50 million, the investment seeing the company value at $500 million after generous donators such as Ron Conway, Snoop Dogg, and Marc Andreessen contributed to the promotional/funding round.

Once I created a profile, I had access to numerous amounts of topics and gained the ability to post, view and comment. I found interest in a variety of subreddits, or categories of topics that help organize fellow reddits comments and posts. A few of the pages I found to be most interesting were ExplainLikeImFive, LifeProTips and PersonalFinance all caught my eye. I was also able to subscribe to numerous subreddits to keep up on new posts or comments on my posts that I made. One unique aspect of Reddit is that users have the ability to “up-vote” or “down-vote” other members’ comments or posts to the social media site, which helps give credibility to a particular post writer. I also found that the app version of the social media site was very helpful and easy to maneuver, just like the actual website.

In terms of business, according to Wikipedia, Reddit experienced an “infiltration” of mass corporations posing as Reddit users to advertise and market their brand. Since Reddit is based on viewers’ responses to certain pages, or subreddits, a business’ reputation can be damaged severely. However, typically a business’ subreddit is not bombed with an overload of negative comments, since the pages usually reflect customer service type pages, so I’ve noticed. For a product, people will post their issues or post their triumphs in fixing a particular issue in their product. I noticed this trend in the Xbox subreddit.

Another way businesses can use Reddit for advertising and promotional services is to customize the sidebar on the business’ particular subreddit. The most common ways I have noticed on Reddit to customize the sidebar is to include a calendar of events, company news or a company goal with a percentage. Overall, I find Reddit to be a decent way to advertise a business. The whole social media platform seems more like a credible Wikipedia and where customer interaction is at a minimum in the site.