Finance marketers, have you ever thought of turning to Reddit for research? This highly popular platform can provide great insights and help you to learn more about the audience you want to connect with. Here’s how our team uses Reddit for research, inspiration and intel.
The Power of Reddit – Stats You Need to Know
Often, marketers turn to Facebook (with its 3.03 billion monthly active users) for insights and a bit of snooping. But many forget to check forums. Reddit can throw up a whole plethora of awesomeness from innovations and competitor ideas to client complaints, bugs and glitches. So here’s the stats you really need to know.
- 50 million people use Reddit every day and 430 million people used it every month in 2023. These numbers offer great potential for some valuable finance-related conversations. You don’t even need to tap into a huge community. Often, small yet active communities can be revealing.
- Reddit achieves more than one billion monthly unique visits. This is largely down to the platform serving up entertainment while simultaneously allowing people to interact with users, share experiences or reviews and learn from the flow of information. It’s the ideal place for marketers to engage directly with their target audience and gather feedback in real-time, especially as people love to get super blunt and factual via an anonymous account name.
- Reddit ranked as the 10th most-visited website in the world and the 6th most-visited website in the US. 47% of its user base comes from the United States where Reddit was born. The next highest user base is in the United Kingdom. Both of these countries play a huge role in the finance space, with the NASDAQ stock market based in New York and the London Stock Exchange dominating the UK. Follow the right subreddits and you could discover a wealth of information about stocks, trades and market news that’s relevant to your target audience.
- There are over three million subreddits on Reddit, paving the way for extremely tailored conversations. For those who are unsure, a subreddit is a space on the platform that’s dedicated to a specific topic, theme or interest. Subreddits serve as mini-communities within the site and act as virtual gathering places for like-minded individuals. They are donated by “r/” followed by the name of the subreddit. For example, r/finance. Finance has a wealth of its own subreddits to delve into at your convenience.
How to Find the Right Subreddits for Finance Research
So as you can see, Reddit is a great tool for hearing information first-hand. It can give you a better idea of what a customer wants and needs. But how can you find the right subreddits for your finance research? Here are a few tips.
#1 Start with a Broad Search
As the Reddit tagline says, you can ‘dive into anything.’ So avoid getting distracted by pets or bread stapled to trees (yes that exists) and instead start with a broad search. Type ‘Finance’ into the search bar and you’ll see that r/finance has 1.9 million members and could be a juicy place to get the ball rolling.
#2 Check Out the Sidebar
Once you’ve identified a subreddit of interest, you can check out the sidebar which will also throw up a host of potential subreddits to explore, such as r/UKPersonalFinance. The questions posted by users here could become the source of all kinds of blog titles for your own marketing strategy. After all, finding people’s pain points on Reddit makes it easy to start addressing common issues or to create a relatable FAQ stack of your own.
#3 Make Sure the Subreddit is Active
The activity within a particular subreddit can vary significantly, so make sure it’s active and offers up-to-date feedback that’ll benefit you and your brand. Sporadic comments are likely to be less helpful. Be sure to collate any useful subreddits into a spreadsheet so you don’t forget about them. Add notes if appropriate.
#4 Analyse the Reddit’s Demographics
Look for demographic clues such as age range, gender distribution, geographic location and interests of the subreddit’s users. Sometimes the information is easy to find. For example, if you want to hone in on a particular region or stock exchange, look for subreddits that include the place of focus such as r/wallstreetbets or r/AusFinance.
#5 Look for Contributions with Good Karma
Reddit uses a point system that reflects the value of a user’s contributions based on the number of upvotes and downvotes they receive. You receive ‘karma’ by posting comments or posting a new thread. Each comment will then receive +1 karma. But this can change according to upvotes and downvotes. If the contributors of a particular subreddit all have bad karma, move on. After all, you should be focussing on finding high value contributions that other members of the community respect. We’ve said it before and we will say it again. Don’t spam and don’t push your products. That’s not what this is!
The Best Subreddits for Finance You Must Follow
Finding the right subreddits can be a unique and individual experience depending on the services you offer and the goals of your brand. But here are some of the best finance subreddits that you might want to follow.
This is a great subreddit for finance news and covers everything from inflation and GDP growth to regulatory news and crypto developments.
Whether you’re an investment firm, a credit card provider or are involved with wealth management, this is a good subreddit to follow. It dishes up a whole array of customer pain points and will help you to listen in and identify what information and services you can give to your clients to help them achieve financial intelligence and security.
With 2.4 million members, this is a popular and active subreddit. It covers the market, market trends, investing and how to invest money wisely. On the sidebar, you’ll also find many blog prompts such as, ‘I’m new to investing, what should I do?’ as well as rules that include ‘no low effort posts.’ Rules like this show that the subreddit is of a high quality designed to attract posts of value.
This subreddit has a whopping 18 million members and covers all kinds of juicy topics including investing, budgeting, planning, credit, retirement, debt, employment, taxes and insurance. Again, it’s up to you to analyse the content that works for you.
With over six million members, this subreddit is perfect for staying on top of the fast-paced crypto market. If crypto is a service you offer or are thinking about offering, you need to immerse yourself here.
How Subreddits Have Influenced Markets
Believe it or not, subreddits have massively influenced the stock market in the past. For example, a bunch of Redditors on the forum r/WallStreetBets – a subreddit for high-risk retail inventors – made GameStop’s stock price soar, much to the chagrin of the hedge funds attempting to short it. In fact, they almost bankrupted institutional investors in a historic reshuffling of power in the finance space.
‘Meme stocks’ like GameStop are created when a company’s shares catch fire with individual investors on social media platforms such as Reddit and quickly skyrocket in price. They have huge earning potential for average Joes on Reddit. But, they’re risky as they rely on high interest from small investors to sustain the stock prices ‘liftoff’ to unprecedented heights.
Stocks are always being watched on Reddit and meme stock launches are always possible. As of 31 October 2023, here are the 10 most mentioned US stocks on the WallStreetBets thread over the last 24-hours, according to data from Quive Quantitative:
Tesla, NVIDIA, SoFi, Apple, C3.ai, AMD, Jacob’s Solution, Amazon, Rivian, Visa.
How to Win on Reddit
By now, you should have got the gist. Reddit is a researcher’s best friend. To win on Reddit, think about:
- Following competitors. If you’re a bank, follow other banks for insights and takeaways from threads. If you’re a crypto provider, follow other crypto providers.
- Search for your own company name, product name, tagline and other identifiers. Then take note of what is being said and feed back to your team.
- Not everything has to be about finance. The biggest trends shaping social media are still good to know as a marketer.
- Read what’s being said and not what you want to hear. Don’t try to make the conversation fit your product if it doesn’t.
- Check out competitor ideas, common client complaints, innovative new ideas, service improvement suggestions, pros and cons of trading platforms, pros and cons of credit cards providers and anything else that could help you move in the right direction.
- You don’t have to be a part of the conversation. Instead you can just listen, learn and upvote.
As Europe’s leading financial services marketing agency, Contentworks works with brokers, banks and fintechs and fully utilises finance forums. Book a free Zoom to talk about your financial services marketing.