Why Marketers Should Care About Reddit and How to Leverage It, with Sam Perry

Sam Perry: Reddit all of a sudden is now known as the best place that your brand can be to get cited by a ChatGPT or a Google AI overview or a Claude. And so naturally, people are now asking the question, how do we get talked about in this space? What are the rules of engagement in this space? And people want that advice. We're starting to have those conversations with clients, and obviously that's why we're talking today.

Lindsey Groper: Hi, welcome back to SaaS Half Full, the only show serving B2B SaaS marketers. I'm Lindsey Groper, EVP at Pan Blast, and I will be both your host and bartender. Today I had a great conversation with my friend and colleague Sam Perry, who is a director at Pan Blast, and Sam and I are talking all things Reddit. I know you all have been talking about Reddit in literally every marketing meeting, how it's affecting AI visibility, How can you begin to have a presence on Reddit? And spoiler, it's not as easy as you think unless you have something called karma. So if you care to pour yourself a drink and join me as I speak with Sam about all things Reddit. Hey, Sam, welcome to Sass Half Full.

Sam Perry: Hey, Lindsay, thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this conversation.

Lindsey Groper: I am pumped. I got to talk to Jake from our team a couple of weeks ago, and when I came up with the idea of, uh, we doing to talk about Reddit, literally, like four people from our team would say, well, you got to talk to Sam. You got to have Sam on. And, like, who knew? So I'm excited to talk to you today. Reddit, for those of you listening is is not a new term. Sam and I were just talking before we hit record that we don't have to go into what is Reddit. Let's hope. If you don't know what Reddit is, I feel like you need to be listening to some other podcasts, uh, to get yourself going, but definitely a topic that we need to talk about. We'll probably past due with it, but before we get into the Reddit factor, want to give our, um, listener Sam a little bit about you. What I appreciate already is that it is 11am on a Wednesday. I poured myself a screwdriver and I wasn't sure if you were going to join me for a drink, but you have a full glass of something.

Sam Perry: I do. Cheers. I went with some would call it the Whiskey Ginger, the Kentucky Mule. Others may know it by ginger ale, bourbon, generous squeeze of a lime wedge. Refreshing and I think good for good on the throat for a long conversation like we're prepared to have.

Lindsey Groper: Absolutely. Well, cheers. Thanks for staying through the process.

Sam Perry: Cheers. Lindsay. Um, I'm, you know, I, I had to, I had to follow through because it is sass, uh, half full after all.

Lindsey Groper: I know Jake almost did not and then he caved at the last minute. So I guess I have that effect on people. But, you know, I have drank alone on the show many a time. I was prepared to do it today, but this will set you up for a great Wednesday. Okay, Sam, tell us a little bit about you, what your history is as a marketer and then what your role is currently at Pan Blast. And then lastly, on top of that, why you want to talk about Reddit?

Sam Perry: Yeah, sure. Well, again, really happy to be here. I am, um, director, uh, of client relations here at, uh, Pan Blast and I've been with the agency for a little over five years, but before that, for about 20 years of my career, I was in a variety of marketing and communications roles, but primarily on the in house side. So in late 2020 I made the jump to the agency world and I now get to talk about and help lots of different brands, not just, not just one brand at a time. And I love it. And why me for Reddit? I talk about Reddit a lot. I talk about things that I've seen that I thought were fun and things that I share with the team and you could argue I might have even been late to the Reddit game, but I've probably been, uh, a Redditor for 10 years and I love all my fun little communities like the Gibson guitar community and the Lord of the Rings community. I've got my calendar back there and my 80s in my 90s grunge communities and, and then a little bit later got more engaged in things like the marketing community and the public relations community and places like that where I can engage and have some professional conversations as well.

Lindsey Groper: There is indeed a subreddit for pretty much everything and anything.

Sam Perry: Absolutely.

Lindsey Groper: You mentioned you were feeling a little bit late to the game and you've been a Redditor for Redditor. That's what we're saying. A redditor for. For 10 years. So Reddit is not new, been around. It's always been a community of people talking to people. However, my goodness, is Reddit having a moment right now in the age of AI Search? It is literally talked about in almost every prospect call that I have. Our clients are asking us about it in terms of how can we support, how can we leverage It. So talk to us, Sam, in your opinion, about why Reddit has become so popular here in the last 12 months?

Sam Perry: Yeah, well, you hit the nail on the head, Lindsay. And it really is all about AI search, Google AI overviews, chat, GPT search, you name it. And look, B2B conversations were happening on Reddit, uh, two years ago and five years ago and 10 years ago. But you know, I think we would both agree that clients weren't asking us about this as a channel for their marketing efforts until a year ago when we all learned that Reddit had become one of, and some even measured as the top cited website by LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude and Perplexity and so forth. Now we are seeing new rankings come out frequently. I saw a couple of months ago that in one measurement YouTube had slightly eclipsed Reddit. Who knows what we'll be saying six months from now. But you know, Reddit all of a sudden is now known as the best place that your brand can be to get cited by a ChatGPT or a Google AI overview or a quad. And so naturally people are now asking the question, how do we get talked about in this space? What are the rules of engagement in this space? And people want that advice. We're starting to have those conversations with clients and obviously that's why we're talking today.

Lindsey Groper: And why are LLM saying Reddit is so authoritative and what are they pulling? Are they pulling just contextually relevant threads? Are they threads with a lot of comments? I might not, um, even using the right language. But why Reddit and what type of hosts are they pulling?

Sam Perry: I think the biggest reason why is because it's authentic user generated content. These are the places where actual practitioners, whether it's people who work IT help desks or whether it's developers or whether it's content marketers or people who work in banking or pickit, they are having the actual conversations about frustrations, they're having issues they're having with vendors. My annoyance, uh, of the week thread, a, uh, shout out for something that their company did really well or something that they're proud of and people are replying and upvoting and engaging and it is just true, genuine authentic conversation. And the LLMs favor that and they tend to dis favor, if that's a term, more of that promotional marketing content. You know, you're not seeing ChatGPT pull in information from companies, ad campaigns, let's say, but you are seeing them pull in citations From Reddit and YouTube and LinkedIn and those user generated Content places, I do think it's fair to say that they're prioritizing conversations that are richer and deeper and have more engagement and more replies. Yes, you're going to occasionally see a post that, uh, doesn't really get any engagement and two people upvote it and nobody replies. And that is not, that's not content rich in a way that ChatGPT really cares about it. So it is going to be, you know, somewhat conversations that have a higher level of engagement that are getting pulled in. The other part of it is that Google has a, uh, licensing agreement with ChatGPT, for example, with OpenAI. So they have like, it's not just an unofficial relationship where Google is scraping that data to use their official partners and Reddit is licensing their information back to Google and OpenAI for their AI overviews and AI search. So that has made Reddit an even more powerful source for those tools to pull from.

Lindsey Groper: Yeah, and I mean, I find myself using the reference Reddit threads in my own search history. I literally just did it. I was ordering from an online pharmacy that I'd never ordered before. And the first thing I did was, right, go, go in and search and say, you know, is this online pharmacy legit? That's what I wrote. And there were so many Reddit threads asking the same exact question and responses and there was not a single one that said, no, it is not. They all said, yes, I ordered this. Yes, here's my, you know, I ordered it, this is when I arrived, loved it. I, I've been using it for years, whatever. So that to me was, in my mind, real people who had the same question and real people who are answering that experience. It was all Reddit. And for me that was like, I was like, okay, I trust it. All these people are saying the same thing. So I experienced that myself on the, from the Google side of it. I think one of the next steps then is so marketers say, yeah, yeah, kcm, we get it, we all need to be on Reddit. But I think this is where marketers run into a problem where it's like, okay, let's get on Reddit. This is different than joining another platform or like, you know, let's start contributing LinkedIn content. Get on Reddit is not what you think it is. So talk to us about if you, uh, do not have a presence on Reddit, if you have found out that none of your employees or spokespeople or senior level executives are on Reddit, what's that process? And why is it not just an Easy. Like, let's get on Reddit, let's join Reddit.

Sam Perry: I think the thing to remember about Reddit is that because the conversations are so genuine and authentic, you cannot just jump into a community and try to start essentially selling something as an account with no history, no credibility. What Reddit calls karma is essentially a reputation currency. And you build karma by being a good member of a community, uploading posts that you think are interesting, replying to things with a thoughtful comment, maybe creating your own post, posing a question, sharing a gripe, whatever. But you're just trying to be a good participant of the community and create some interesting conversation. And this is what's key. You have to do it when there's nothing in it for you, when there's no stakes at all. Because if you create enough karma and credibility as a sort of member of the community, or what we would call a subreddit, a member of the subreddit in good standing, then you can have an opportunity. When an opportunity presents itself that you might say to someone, oh, I see you posted about this challenge, or that you're looking to find a solution, you know, I am in this capacity at, uh, this company and I might be able to help you. Maybe, you know, send me a dm, um, if you want to talk, you know, that would be a good way that you could engage. And you're just extending a hand to say, I think I could help you. And if that person looks at your history and sees, oh, this person's been around for a while, I can see they've contributed on a bunch of threads. They're not, they've never been salesy about anything. They're just trying to be helpful or trying to be thoughtful. They are not going to perceive that in a negative way. You're not going to get banned for something like that by a moderator, which I will call a mod, or the mods who control these communities. If you are a member in good standing who has participated when there was nothing in it for you, but it takes some time to build that up. And you can do it on subreddits that are of personal interest to you, you can do it on subreddits that are of professional interest to you, or both. But if you just create your account today and try to jump in there and say, who is looking for a solution for xyz, I've got one for you that's just not going to fly.

Lindsey Groper: M Or I guess if you go in and start replying to a bunch of threads where you're offering up like the same comment saying, oh, we can help or we do this. And you're doing that across, you know, across all these different subreddits, seeing as, like spam. So the karma is a score and detached every user.

Sam Perry: Yeah.

Lindsey Groper: And who is giving you karma?

Sam Perry: The platform gives it to you automatically by virtue of your activity. So the more you upvote posts, the more you reply to posts, the more your replies or your own posts get engaged with or get upvoted, the more karma that you are building over time. And some communities, uh, in both professional subreddits as well as just fun subreddits will have guidelines in terms of how much karma or how long your account has to have existed in order to post. They don't all have those guidelines. It's going to vary from subreddit to subreddit. And I think that's an important thing to note that, you know, anything we talk about today. There's no one universal guide for the best way to engage as a brand on Reddit, because the guidelines do vary from one community to the next. Some are going to be very explicit to say vendors are welcome if engagements are not promotional. Others aren't going to say anything about that at all. Others are going to say vendors welcome if disclosed. And that could mean that to participate in that community, you need to put in your profile. Yeah, I'm the chief marketing officer at a tech company that provides XYZ types of solutions. Other communities don't care or they want you to disclose it when you post. But it doesn't have to be in your profile. It's not as complex as it sounds. The variations from one subreddit to the next are not going to be massive. And. But you do need to pay attention to the community rules because it's playing by the community rules that are going to allow you to build up that karma, that credibility which opens doors for you down the road.

Lindsey Groper: And this is always a brand or, excuse me, individual human being. There's not like brand accounts.

Sam Perry: Yeah, I mean there are brand accounts and you typically would see advertising under brand accounts. But the strong, strong recommendation is that you need to be a person. You could be Sam Perry. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. I could be Sam Perry at, you know, Sam Perry from. Or Sam from Pan Blast. Or I could put in my profile that I'm with an agency. You can choose how forward you want to be with the fact that you're representing a company in the name of your handle. You can choose whether or not you want to do that. But yes, you should be posting as a person, not as a brand. Now if you want to have a different Reddit account for your, your personal fun communities that you're engaged in from your professional ones, totally up to you. You can do that. But certainly don't go and upload each other's posts or anything like that. If you ever get caught doing that, the mods are absolutely going to ban you.

Lindsey Groper: I want to move on to the, the mods and some of the red flags they look for, but. Last question on karma. What is like a good karma score? Acceptable formal score?

Sam Perry: Yeah, I wish I could answer that question for you, Lindsay, but the reality is it does vary. I can tell you that the one bad karma score is, is to have zero. You gotta start somewhere and you will start to build it up fairly quickly if you can just get engaged in some communities in a genuine and non, um, promotional way. But there isn't necessarily one right answer. You know, in some of the bigger communities, your top 1% posters, they could have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of karma. But look, I've posted in communities where I, you know, I, at some point, maybe I only had a thousand karma or something like that. And I mean, it was fine. My post showed up, people engaged with me, there was no obstacle there. It is just going to vary from one community to the other. I guess if I had to put a number, I would probably not push my luck and try to be promotional or offer assistance on a specific solution or something like that. By offering that, I could help if I didn't have at least a couple hundred karma. And it wouldn't take that long to build that up. You know, upvote some posts, reply to some posts. You know, create a post that's low stakes, there's nothing in it for you or your company. You could build up that amount of karma relatively quickly with.

Lindsey Groper: Okay, that's helpful. So if a brand wants to get started, it has to start with identifying number one. Why, I guess. Why? Why would a brand want to get started on Reddit? Let's talk about that. I mean there's, we talked about AI visibility, but specifically like what are we trying to optimize for? You know, what do we want to be part of? So like identifying the why, but then you have to identify the who within the org and what are some of your suggestions on, like how to get the who on board? Because this requires a person, you or me or someone else going in and personally, not anyone ghostwriting on my behalf, but personally going in and interacting. So what are some thoughts around, like how to actually do that and identify the people?

Sam Perry: Sure, I do want to call before I answer that question, because we've talked so much about these communities. But for listeners who may not be as familiar with some of those B2B communities, I did pull a few numbers that I wanted to share on what I thought was a pretty representative mix of just five or six major subreddits that people who are in B2B tech might be interested in. And I'm going to read these so I didn't have to memorize them. But the biggest one I found was the subreddit that's called sysadmin and this is all things it it operations and related. This subreddit has 1 million weekly visitors. That's not even the total membership of the subreddit, but just people that are active on a weekly basis. The subreddit for cybersecurity has 470,000. The subreddit for accounting and who Would have thought Accounting and Reddit, it has 433,000 weekly visitors. Human resources, all things workforce, management, labor and employment, you name IT, benefits, administration, 314,000 weekly visitors. So for all of our listeners out there who sell into these and other types of verticals, Reddit is where you need to be. If we hadn't already convinced you of that, hopefully some of those numbers would now you get to the who. So I hope that all of our listeners will, if they don't already have a Reddit account, we'll just go create one today. Right? But in the long term play, where I would probably start is just talking to my team to say, look, I really want us to figure out how we can leverage this. Who here loves Reddit, who is already engaged. And, uh, there's got to be someone, if not more than one person, and if that individual will be willing to sort of be the guinea pig if they're not already engaged in a professional manner that you just weren't even aware of, because they just enjoy talking to people in that community. See if someone can kind of step up and be willing to say, look, I could dedicate a, uh, half an hour of this a week checking out the communities that are the verticals that we sell to or that are the disciplines of our decision makers. So that could be, look, there's a CMO community, there's a fintech community, there are multiple styles of marketing communities, from the big marketing to marketing automation to digital marketing, and just keep going on from there. So whether it's A community where your ICP lives by title, or a community where they live by virtue of who they sell to or the sector that they're in, You've got a lot of options. So become members of that community. There's no barrier to joining and lurk for a while. Get a sense for the vibe of the community. See what kinds of things people are posting about, look at sort by the top, post for this week or this month, or look at what's hot, what's rising. There's a bunch of different ways you can filter or search for your brand, search for your competitors, search for the use case, see what people are saying about these terms in these companies and then start to report back. This is even pre engagement, just sort of the market intelligence opportunity that's there in Reddit. Not unlike your example of when you went to go find some information about an online pharmacy. Right. You weren't looking to engage as much as you were looking to get information. Anybody can do this right now. And maybe a good place to start is by finding somebody who's already active on Reddit and already familiar. And if no one is, then let's just get somebody to volunteer and say, great, let's listen to this podcast from Sam and Lindsey. It's a good starting point. There's a million other resources out there that you could look at about where to engage and how to sort of play by the, play by the rules and build up some karma. But let's see what we can learn about these communities and what our buyers are talking about. And then let's see, let's look for some opportunities to engage and start to become a good member of that community. So that when an opportunity comes along where someone says, hey, I work in banking and are trying to find a solution to do xyz, or we're not happy with the one that we're currently using, which is this one, what do you all think about it? You could reach out and say, well, hey, I actually work for so and so, and I'd be happy to give you some information. Why don't you DM me?

Lindsey Groper: Right?

Sam Perry: That's a perfectly fine action you could take once you've built up some credibility in the community.

Lindsey Groper: Yeah, and, and what you're saying to get started is a pretty light lift. You're saying, spend 30 minutes a week, lurk around, just do some research. Thumbs up. They're not thumbs up. What is it? Whatever, upvote. Upvote a few posts and start that way without having to take the step of actually like posting or commenting. And we saw this out too. We had a member of our team who has built up karma. And there was a, literally, I mean, there was a post that was a perfect opportunity to surface like our agency. It was talking about B2B tech PR agencies. And because he built up karma, he was able to weigh in with some thoughts. But he said, hey, you know, hi, I'm from Pan Blast, weighing in with an agency perspective. And now like that post has indexed and is surfacing for us on the LLMs. And then I also just saw that that particular Reddit post is in our like top 50 traffic refers also to our site in that one post. Now he was able to do it because he had accumulated some karma, but we saw that play out in real life with us as well. We're like, I don't have enough built up. If I went in there and said that, I would likely get, I don't know, let's talk about this Flagged band, slapped on the wrist, smacked in the face. What am I? What's happening within this community? What are the red flags? And then like, what are the consequences?

Sam Perry: Yeah, and I think your example is a really good one. And my example was a little bit, leaned a little bit more into like getting a sales lead but having it be visible and that it could be talked about. And I think your example is great because you're showing how an engagement in, uh, a community conversation has led to these positive traffic referrals and so forth. Which is, which is exactly what you want to see. The, the whole idea here isn't really about can I get one more sales lead a month? But it's can I engage in a way that, that gets people talking about the brand? Because that's where you're going to start to see that referral. But sometimes it is that door opening of somebody looking for a solution that gives you the opportunity to have that conversation. To your question about red flags and the mods, I would say that a big red flag is a no or low karma or low history Redditor. So jumping in with something that seems promotional when you've got no credibility or history in the community, or maybe even on Reddit at all, is a big red flag. Any violation of just that subreddit's actual community guidelines, because they could have a guideline against doing this or that or something along those lines. Big red flag. Any super overt marketing, promotional, corporate jargony type language, red flag. People on Reddit talk extremely casually. Acronyms, tldrs. At, uh, the end of a longer post. Things along those lines, I mean, I'm not saying necessarily sloppy, like no capitalization and never bothering to use a period anywhere. But it's a pretty casual place, certainly less so than someplace like LinkedIn. So that kind of formal corporate marketing jargon is just not going to fly. The mods are volunteers. They don't work for Reddit. They have great intolerance for violations of their community guidelines and they are very protective of their communities and wanting it to be a place where people can interact in a genuine way and get real information and vent and get real answers to their questions from other like minded folks. And they will ban people quick. You might get a warning, you might not, but they will ban you quick if you have made an egregious violation of the community guidelines. And they can ban you from more than one subreddit at a time. And there's, you don't really have much recourse, nobody. You're not going to call Reddit customer service and get your way out of this. And if you do something that sort of triggers other Reddit members to pile on and say, you know what, I used your company five years ago and you guys suck and more people pile on, you can't get rid of that stuff. And what we've talked about in terms of the upside of referrals from Reddit conversations, there's a downside too. And if you get, you know, nailed to the wall because you violated guidelines or you did something overly promotional, those replies are going to live forever. You can delete your post and the replies remain. You gotta be careful. You gotta play by the rules. There's not a shortcut to this.

Lindsey Groper: Yeah, and that's one of the things that uh, was surprising to me. Let's get on Reddit. And it's like, oh, uh, well, you can, but it's gonna take some time to build. Yeah, is right. The whole point of Reddit is that they're real people and credible people and it's not a place to sell. I mean that's, you know, why it exists and why people love it. And from a brand standpoint, I mean, if you're sitting here thinking like, God, uh, we're not on a Reddit, we need to get people on Reddit. Like, you are not alone. To Sam's point, there are just people who are Redditors that have been personally been on for a while. You mentioned that, like the personal cybernettes that you're a part of. Personal and both professional too. And there are people that have just been members of the community that also may not realize like they have a lot of value now within their orgs to start to help with their AI visibility strategy through Reddit, which is pretty wild. Sam, um, what else haven't we talked about that you want to make sure that we cover as it relates to Reddit?

Sam Perry: As I said before, I do think it's important to try to get engaged soon. But it may be that if you're not somebody who's been on Reddit, or you have an account and you don't really use it much, or you're going to try to tag someone from your team in to sort of like lead the charge at your organization, it's going to be easier to just engage on a personal level first. So, look, I went to iu, I'm in a couple different Hoosier subreddits. I like music, I'm in a lot of different music subreddits and movies and things like that. Everybody's got Hobb, everybody's got interests. Go engage with some communities that are just fun. If you just want to get a feel for Reddit before you decide to make this a marketing strategy, spend a month in there, or have someone spend a month in there just lurking and maybe starting to engage and just things that they find are fun, that's going to give you or someone on your team, you're going to feel more comfortable than when you decide, okay, now is when I want to engage in the SaaS subreddit. And there's a big SaaS subreddit. And it's not just for people who work in SaaS. People are going there to ask about SaaS solutions too, or the startup subreddit or marketing or accounting or whatever is relevant. But if you sort of start on a little bit on a clearly a much lower stakes level of just engaging on a personal level, then you'll feel more comfortable, uh, once you start to engage on, uh, a professional level. And I guess I would just reiterate again, you can't. It really does take time. It's kind of like a neighborhood. You don't just walk to the house, five houses down that you've never talked to, and just knock on their door and ask to borrow like their cordless drill. Like you need to wave at them when you drive by, chat with them in their yard. When you're on a walk. You gotta build some relationship currency right before you go and make an ask to borrow a power tool. And I think Reddit is a lot like that. You need to take a little bit of time to become, you know, you don't have to be the best known member of the community, but you have to be a known member. And that's because you've got the karma, you've got the post history.

Lindsey Groper: That's really good advice, Sam. This has been great. I end every episode the same way, which is I ask my guests if they have a signature or favorite toast to send us out.

Sam Perry: Yes, that is a good question. Uh, I have given a few toasts in my day, but I don't know if I have a signature one. I think I would just say, you know, uh, uh, cheers and in good health. Cheers to you, Lindsay. This was a great conversation. I enjoyed it.

Lindsey Groper: Thanks for joining me, Sam. Cheers.

Sam Perry: Absolutely.

Lindsey Groper: Thanks again to Sam for joining me on Sass Half Full. Always love having one of our own on the show and appreciate him joining me for a drink in the a.m. m hour on a Wednesday. I hope you all took a couple things away from this on how you can start to become involved on Reddit. It is no easy task. If you find the right person though, you can start to have a strategy around it. Thanks again for the listen. Always appreciate it. Until next time. Bottoms.