We Studied The Top Posts In Business Related Subreddits (This Is What We Found)

Reddit is the third most popular site in the world. The top brands are embracing it. The best communities are using it.

And the smartest marketers are leveraging it.

Despite the amazing potential that is offered by Reddit through advertising, content creation and distribution, the platform is under-utilized in the advertising & marketing industry. As a result, the best practices around what a marketer should do to leverage Reddit is relatively unknown.

At Foundation, we’ve published an entire report on best practices surrounding Reddit Marketing. The report highlights insights surrounding: the best headlines for subreddits, most viral content formats on Reddit and even the topics that resonate best inside different communities.

(Read to the end to access the entire data set of our Reddit Data)

Before this… There wasn’t much out there for marketers to leverage. So we created it. And to take it a step further; we specifically wanted to look at Reddit from a business lens. Thus, we dove into six of the most popular business Subreddits:

And studied the 20 most upvoted posts inside of these communities. We’ve done this analysis to garner some insights around what makes business content successful. On average, the posts that we’ve analyzed have generated 740 upvotes and more than 130 comments.

Want to unlock some of the insights that will help you do the same?

Here’s 5 interesting insights around the types of content that the people subscribing to business related Subreddits really want…

Text Based Posts Drive The Most Upvotes In Business Subreddits

In all of the subreddits we looked at, the most upvoted content were posts that were made up of text. In fact, the only subreddit where half of the amount of posts in the top 20 were images was /r/Productivity:

As mentioned above, Reddit is a place for discussion. People log on to learn, share opinions, share news, and ask questions. Additionally, each subreddit typically has its own set of rules that one must follow should you wish to be allowed to continue contributing. This is done, again, to keep the discussion as organic and un-spammy as possible by limiting self-promotion and external linking.

How To Leverage This Reddit Insight:

If you want to submit a post talking about your product or service, don’t just post a link to your site or another page. Tell a story and talk about your development process, about your experience hiring a remote team (like a remote development team, for example) or reference a piece of content elsewhere by copying and pasting rather than linking. Do this a few times to build your reputation before adding links or photos into the mix. Also, keep the conversation going by asking for opinions and feedback.

The Best Business Posts On Reddit Average More Than 1,400 Words

In marketing, we know from experience that long-form content typically ranks better and gets more shares than short-form content, and there is research to back that up. We see the same rule ringing true in some subreddits.

The two most popular business subreddits, /r/Entrepreneur and /r/Startups, have top posts that average 1400+ words, with some of those in the top 4 having upwards of 2200 words! Again, we’re seeing that people value something of substance.

How To Leverage This Reddit Insight:

Tell your story. People like hearing other people’s stories and the struggles they overcame. Titles like ‘I made $1,000,000 by selling a book explaining how to become a millionaire’ and ‘My startup bombed and I lost everything (here’s what I learned)’, got lots of love from /r/Entrepreneur and /r/Startups users.

Content That Offers Real Business Lessons Get The Most Upvotes

People who subscribe to business subreddits are looking for insights.

Similar to the way that they’d expect Forbes, Business Insider, Medium.com or a popular blog to deliver valuable lessons – they want that from Reddit. In fact, it’s lesson focused posts that generate the vast majority of the upvotes in business related Subreddits.

More than 55% of the top content on /r/Startups and /r/Entrepreneur were about lessons that other members of the subreddit learned through their own experiences. Here’s a sample of the top content making up the Subreddit /r/Startups:

And here’s a sample from /r/Entrepreneur:

Sharing insights, secrets, triumphs and challenges really resonates with the readers of these subreddits.

How To Leverage This Reddit Insight:

Hindsight is 20/20.When you tell your story, explain what you learned from it and how others can do it differently. This is an example of a submission that got a lot of love in /r/Startups: ‘‘My manager (who I loved) recently left my company. I summarized some of my notes from our many conversations. Here they are: I wish someone wrote this for me when I started.”

Top Posts Mention How Much Money They Made

Specifically, 50% of the top posts in /r/Entrepreneur mention how much money they made or traffic they generated, although /r/Startups do not.

And as expected; it was content that talked about actual dollars.  Nearly half of the most upvoted posts on /r/Entrepreneur talk about money or growth success using numbers of some sort.

On the flipside, the conversation happening over on /r/Startups is quite different. It’s very rare to find people talking specifically about how they were able to make their first $100K or grow an Instagram account to over 150,000 followers. It’s this insight that shows us how important it really is to understand the reality that each Subreddit is different.

SIDE NOTE: In our 2020 Reddit Marketing Report; we break down trends surrounding 150 different subreddits to help you better understand what content your audience wants. Whether it’s a Subreddit about business, sports, cooking or games — you have to understand your audience if you want them to care about the content you’re creating.

How To Leverage This Reddit Insight:

Know the audience you’re speaking with. Yes, those trying to launch a startup are entrepreneurs, but the terms have different stigmas around them. Startups are likely to go through a fews failures before making it anywhere good, while the entrepreneur behind the startup is really living his or her best life doing what he/she loves to do no matter what.

The Best Subreddit For Engagement Is /r/Entrepreneur

If you want to see some real activity, /r/Entrepreneur is where you need to be! In our research, the average total of comments on a top /r/Entrepreneur post is 525, so there’s some deep discussion going on. Not only that, they by far get the most upvotes with the top post gaining 10,300 alone.

Visitors to this subreddit are coming together to discuss common interests and topics of relevance. This is definitely not a subreddit in which to dump and run.

How To Leverage This Reddit Insight:

Get in there and become a part of the conversation! Share your thoughts, give you opinion, answer questions and give an upvote or two. The best way to get to know Reddit and become a recognized Reddit player is to just do it.

Now Go Make Reddit Count…

Reddit is certainly an interesting social platform. There’s really nothing fancy about it, and when you first land on its homepage, you may find yourself sitting there wondering if the rest of it is going to load because the experience is so simplistic.

Once you get over that; you quickly realize that’s not exactly what it’s user care about.

They care about great content.

And it’s our hope that you can use our analysis and quick tips to take your first steps toward mastering Reddit for your own business and creating great content.

If you want an even closer look at the data, take a look at this bonus spreadsheet that shows you the specific content in each subreddit and how well they did.