Make Reddit work for you

The first time you visit Reddit, you’re going to be overwhelmed. The website, which bills itself as “The Front Page of the Internet,” looks like a disorganized mess to the untrained eye. The main page, www.reddit.com, contains links to numerous “subreddits,” along with a huge list of seemingly random posts with nothing in common.

It’s all user-generated content, which is the key to its success. As such, the site combines some of the best and worst qualities of the internet. Any user can post an image, video, comment, or link. Posts are “upvoted” or “downvoted” by other users or “redditors.” This affects their placement on the site. Popular posts may even be promoted out of their subreddit to appear on the main Reddit homepage.

If you think of Reddit as the guide on your TV, then the subreddits are the channels. And there really is a channel for everything from craft beer to knitting.

Many of these subreddits are thriving communities where devotees of a particular hobby or vocation can discuss their shared obsession. There are also popular general interest communities like r/TodayILearned and r/AskReddit, both of which have more than 10 million subscribers.

That’s a huge audience, and Pinelands Nursery sales manager Fran Chismar wanted to tap into it. The New Jersey-based wholesale grower provides millions of plants for environmental restorations throughout the Mid-Atlantic states. Chismar created a blog on the nursery’s website, and began to post articles based on the questions they were asked most often.

“It wasn’t so much to market the plants or the product, but to market us as leaders in the industry,” Chismar says.

Many of Pinelands Nursery’s customers are landscape contractors who are working on ecological restoration projects. They need to know which erosion control matting to use, or whether to use bareroot or containerized material for a particular job. Pinelands’ staff was answering those questions on its blog, but not enough people were reading.

In doing his own research into how Reddit was used, Chismar found the ecological restoration subreddit (r/restoration_ecology). The people who frequent this subreddit are the type of people Pinelands wants to reach. Posting links to the Pinelands Nursery blog seemed like a great way to enrich that community, while also bringing traffic to those blog posts, so he created an account. As a reddit neophyte, it was daunting. But the results were staggering.

“It was amazing the traffic it started bringing to our blog,” Chismar says.

One key to successfully sharing posts on Reddit is to obey “Reddiquette,” a series of rules for conduct on the site. Pinelands’ posts never focus on selling. They’re educational, not promotional. Redditors can and will downvote your post into oblivion if it feels like a sales pitch. Chismar tries to give the positive and negative for each side of a question and let the consumer make the choice.

“When you’re an expert, people are more apt to trust you,” he says. “Even if you’re not making the sale, if you’re their first phone call, that’s a win. Because our customers trust our opinion, they’ll call us first. That’s a really good position to be in, whether you help them or steer them in another direction, because they know we have their best interest in mind.”

For more: www.pinelandsnursery.com