Advance Local uses organic on Reddit and Reddit Pro to grow traffic and find new audiences
Learn how they were able to use organic engagement on Reddit to drive site traffic and improve engagement.
TL;DR News media publisher Advance Local uses organic engagement on Reddit to drive site traffic with readers who care about their stories and Reddit Pro to improve their engagement approach.
Advance Local is a leading US-based publisher with local newspapers and digital media properties across the country, such as MLive.com and Cleveland.com, who were early adopters of Reddit Pro - Reddit’s new organic business tools.
MLive.com and Cleveland.com began engaging organically on Reddit because their teams were made up of redditors and saw the potential value, due to Reddit being community-based versus algorithm-based. Their goals included driving traffic or page views, and tapping into traditionally underserved communities.
Their approach to engaging organically on Reddit is primarily focused on posting stories in communities who have an interest in them, and also using these stories to help foster real connection among redditors. They’ve found success sharing non-paywalled articles to redditors in order to provide access and drive informed discussion in the comment section.
As a result of their organic engagement on Reddit, Advance Local’s sites have seen steady growth in referral traffic both from what they post and from redditors posting their stories.
As an early tester of Reddit Pro, Advance Local’s sites were able to expand their audience and improve their Reddit engagement strategy. Using Reddit Pro, they were able to easily find what content is additive to the communities already discussing their stories (often pulling from 200-1K+ weekly mentions depending on their site). They also found subreddits where their stories are being shared that they wouldn’t have thought about contributing to otherwise.
“Reddit Pro’s listening tools are helpful in identifying subreddits that we wouldn’t have considered contributing to. It also helps us determine for our most active subreddits like r/cleveland, what kind of content they want to see and discuss.” - Joshua Duke, Senior Social Media Producer, cleveland.com
Specifically for their site MLive, Reddit Pro’s Performance insights guided the site towards engaging more with topic-based subreddits such as r/politics where their content was viewed as helpful versus local-subreddits that MLive had initially started engaging with.
“My biggest shift since using Reddit Pro was moving from engaging in locality-based subreddits where we were mentioned the most, to topic-based subreddits where Redditors are interested in discussing content about topics they care about. [...] For example, we posted a story about Madonna in r/madonna that only we had and it resonated there because of what that community is dedicated to. For our politics stories, specifically, we now find that posting a story in a politics-topic subreddit can generate more engagement than in our main Facebook page.” - Gillian Van Stratt, Director of Audience, MLive.com
The Advance Local’s team’s advice for any business looking to start engaging on Reddit is to be the human behind the keyboard and remember that you are stepping into redditors’ world - it can be challenging at times to get started, but it makes engaging on the platform that much more worthwhile.
Reddit Pro is advanced tools for businesses that unlock the power of Reddit’s communities & conversations – where opinions are formed and decisions are made.