Currently Facebook is the undisputed king of social media. In fact some might say it is the overall king of the internet. There is another website that is out there that is quickly growing and for good reason. Reddit, to many across the globe, is their main source for news, entertainment, interaction and much more. It’s slogan after all is “the front page of the internet”.
Advance publications is its largest shareholder still but it operates as an independent entity. This enables reddit to be run quite differently than some of the bigger name social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. There are still ads and paid links etc. but none of them really take away from the user experience. Facebook however is the opposite claiming they also want to better the user experience using a certain algorithm but their paid ads seem to overshadow some organic posts and the user doesn’t always see what they want. 1 point reddit.
This is the “reason” *cough excuse cough* Facebook business page posts are now hardly reaching .05%-1% of the total Facebook fans on a page. Businesses are now forced to pay to spread their posts, but here is the kicker, even when paying for a post it won’t reach the majority of your followers. These issues are beginning to plague Facebook and even though they have the most users, a social media manager might realize it may not be worth it to invest in Facebook. Instead my suggestion is to find some of the new up and coming social media platforms that give direct access to your target markets.
Reddit may not be for everyone, it can be overwhelming at first as well (the grammar police can be downright cruel to some!), but it literally has something for everyone. Not only does Reddit offer specific niche subreddits that every business can find at least one connection to, it provides direct access to them. See the subreddits are the posting board area where one can post a link about a certain topic and everyone who follows that certain topic will see it. Very simple.
With what we’ve just covered let’s see an example of how Reddit out performed Facebook in terms of reach. The same picture was used on Facebook and Reddit. Two captions (each platforms always has different types of captions for the audience). Facebook reach from a page with 15,700 fans-256. Reddit reach from a subreddit with 20,000 subscribers-6,900. That is roughly 26 times more reach than Facebook. 6,000 points (or upvotes-Reddit lingo) for Reddit.
All cases can and will be different and this is just one example. The facebook fans who liked that page missed out while the people who shared a general interest in a category on reddit from all over the world were able to be reached. Reddit can still be a tricky social media platform to explore as a business because of the core users. They are what keep reddit from going to the wolves. Each subreddit has sets of rules that one must follow to be allowed to post in there and each subreddit has moderators to keep order.
The point of all of this is that Reddit has access to so many users locally and from around the world. It is great for small businesses and those trying to build recognition. When managing social media for a new company please keep this in mind: Facebook used to be king, but now it’s kingdom is being split apart into more user specific domains.
