How to Use Reddit for Digital PR: A Complete Guide

Reddit is a goldmine for digital PR - as the saying goes “things are big on Reddit before they’re big anywhere else”.

You can use Reddit in all aspects of digital PR too from ideation and data collection to distribution.

Ideation

Reddit threads can provide excellent inspiration for digital PR campaigns.

Threads that have high engagement indicate a strong public interest in the topic, which is exactly what you need for digital PR.

If your campaign will get people talking, journalists will want to publish it.

To find high engagement posts in your niche:

One: Browse niche-related subreddits or use keyword searches related to your topic.
Two: Order the posts by ‘top’ to find posts with the most comments and upvotes.

For example, a search for "wedding dress" revealed these three threads:

This tells me that people like to talk about celebrity or TV wedding dresses.

Some campaigns I could run related to this topic?

—> "The most expensive TV wedding dresses ever worn"
—> “How much each royal wedding dress is worth” (best pitched whenever there is a royal wedding!)

Reddit is also a good source for ideating expert commentary pitches.

For example, this question in r/frugal could easily be transformed into an expert-led story.

“Expert reveals £1 hack to keep your home smelling fresh”

Apart from niche-specific subreddits, you can also take a look at subreddits like r/dataisbeautiful, r/coolguides, and r/visualization.

Data Collection

If you don’t have the luxury of having internal data or the money to run a survey, you will need to turn to alternative data sources.

One of which is Reddit comments / poll answers. You will have to scrape the comments, which can sound scary, but there are tools online that can do this for you.

Here's a real-world example of how this would work.

InsureandGo conducted a study on "destinations people most want to return to" by analysing comments from threads answering that exact question in r/Travel.

To get the comments, all they would have to do is paste the URLs of these threads into a tool like this Reddit Apify scraper, and they would get a CSV file to download.

Once they have the comments, they would then need to extract the destinations from the comments.

Depending on the number of comments you have, you could potentially do this manually or get an assistant to do it for you. 

But I would recommend using AI to help you with tasks like this. You can paste the comments into an AI chatbot and ask it to pull the destinations out.

Here at JournoFinder, we’ve made our lives even easier and built an AI integrated Google sheet which we can paste the comments directly into along with our prompt and then get the results in the sheet.

Here’s sheet 1, where you paste the comments in.

And here’s sheet 2, the output sheet.

In this example here is the prompt I used was:

“These are comments answering the question 'what destinations would you most want to return to?’ Your job is to read the whole comment and extract the destination name.

Provide the destination name. If there is more than one destination named, separate the answers with a comma.”

You can also use the sheet for things like analysing the sentiment of reviews or checking TikTok transcripts for misinformation - if you want the sheet, scroll to the bottom and you can request access.

Another creative example of using Reddit data I liked involved analysing state-specific subreddit comments (e.g. r/Texas) to see which state used swear words most often.

Distribution

Reddit can also be a powerful platform for promoting your campaigns, but it requires a nuanced approach.

The platform is particularly sensitive to overtly promotional content, but with the right strategy, you can effectively share your work and not get banned.

There are two options:

One: Post the campaign directly on Reddit and see if journalists pick it up from there.
Two: Once the campaign has got some coverage, post a link to said coverage to help get more eyeballs on the article.

With option one, you are at high risk of your post being deleted if you link directly to a page on your site, because the mods may see this as self promotion. 

Therefore, this method works best when you have a microsite type campaign that you can host on its own domain (or if your study is so interesting people won’t care that it’s self promotional).

For example, we made a microsite called taconomical.com, where we mapped the price of certain products at every Taco Bell in the US. 

This was very popular on Reddit (we posted in r/tacobell and r/internetisbeautiful), and very soon it got picked up by journalists via Reddit.

Here are some examples of option two. All of these are links to a news article. This option is easier because this is much less likely to be seen as self promotion.

With both options you need to make sure you’re posting on a relevant subreddit and that your post is adding value. You want to encourage comments and upvotes so your post doesn’t disappear into obscurity straight away.

P.S. You can buy upvotes on the internet if you want to give your post an early boost.