Building Credibility with Young Consumers through Reddit

What is Reddit?

Affectionately called the “front page of the internet,” Reddit is built upon a massive collection of forums in which users can submit, discuss, and rate text, image, and video-based content with other redditors. The diversity in these individual forums (aka subreddits) is staggering, ranging from broad topics like music (r/Music) to wildly specific, and slightly absurd, ones like r/TheOcho, which covers the world’s weird and obscure sports.

Indeed, Reddit is a massive entity; with over 430 million monthly active users across more than 130,000 active subreddits, it’s the 8th most popular website in the US and 20th globally. Even more, its free-wheeling, authentic communication style has made it a darling among young digital natives. According to the company’s 2019 report, their Gen Z user base amassed more than 8 billion monthly views of content on the platform.

How Does it Affect Nextatlas?

With this massive size and reach, Reddit immediately becomes the 3rd largest data source on Nextatlas, trailing only Twitter and Instagram; its impact is far reaching across all the content on Nextatlas, but most noticeably in the Technology, Finance, Automotive, and Entertainment industries.

However, beyond simply further enriching and enhancing our data pool, the singularity of Reddit’s usage adds an entirely new dimension to the Nextatlas platform not found from other sources. Primarily, the specificity and expertise that exists within subreddits means that communication in these spaces is quite different than on other platforms. Users speak freely and knowledgeably of specific interests, concerns, and expertise, often using language codified to that particular subculture.

Thus, not only does the existing vocabulary on our platform benefit from Reddit’s addition, but we’re now also able to expand our platform’s vocabulary to include a slew of new Reddit-unique terms across every industry from Beauty (eg. microneedles, depotting, perspirant) to Technology (eg. openvr, demonetizes, dumbphone).

To see the implications of this addition, look no further than the impact on a recent trend at the intersection of two highly affected industries: Technology & Finance. Our Digital Sustainability trend centers around the environmental impact of activities from established and emerging digital industries, such as cryptocurrency. And, considering Reddit’s interest and engagement with the evolving cryptocurrency and NFT economies, it’s no surprise that their inclusion into the data stream made some waves. In fact, Reddit is now the leading data source for this trend, composing 45% of the relevant posts.

Perhaps even more importantly, Reddit’s ability to offer the viewpoint of those deeply entrenched in these conversation spaces is proving to be a critical component in our ability to deliver insights of unparalleled specificity and timeliness. Especially within topics such as crypto, data from Reddit is often far more illustrative of the perspectives of early adopters than that from other social media platforms.

The images above show Nextatlas data before and after the addition of Reddit for two terms integral to the crypto community — “mining,” which refers to the action required to harvest cryptocurrencies and “binance,” which is a conjunction of bitcoin and finance. The discrepancies in the data with and without Reddit clearly showcase the granular impact of Reddit on our data.

Finding an avenue to this level of specificity, both in subject matter and language, is supremely important for brands trying to establish trustworthy connections with consumers and build inroads into these passionate, knowledgable micro-communities. Whether finding the right words or better understanding hidden pain points, getting on the ground data from inside these subcultures could be the key to your brands’ success.

The inclusion of Reddit to the Nextatlas platform, alongside our already extensive social media data pool, presents a terrific opportunity to understand consumer trends at the macro and micro level.