Best Engagement Pratices

Comment Marketing 101.

Don't take it from Advite; Take it from the fastest growing company, ever: Deel.

As a ground rule when crafting responses: self-promotion is often frowned upon, but solid, grounded advice is always sure to win.

On Reddit

The first thing to know about Reddit, is that it has its own culture. Every subreddit is like its own little world.

The fastest way to understand Reddit’s culture is to use the platform for your own personal interests on a daily basis. You’ll get the sense of the culture, norms, memes, and political stance faster than any guide can preach. On Reddit it’s actually encouraged to use your work account for your personal interests, as it makes you more authentically you.

Your Responses Should:

Answer the question / help the person out.
Provide an expertise-reference of some kind to back up that your advice is sound. Your experience working for / owning a brand is a huge asset.
Explain all of the available options yes, including your competitors & their benefits fairly.
Offer insights/stats you’re privileged to that might not be obvious to the OP. People love numbers.
Provide space for the person to engage back with you; opening up an avenue to advertise later.

More Detail:

The best people who do this focus on creating great interactions with the community, not just selling. The more a community likes you and trusts you, the more likely they are to convert, upvote your engagement, and buy your products. Reddit users are more likely to convert when they don't feel pressure to.
You should be on accounts that are tied to your brand, so the community sees the connection between your awesome advice and your brand.
When it comes to tone, lots of tones work, just make sure the tone isn't "some neutral customer support agent". Be authentically you. Have an opinion. Let the community know there's a real person behind the account. A human touch goes a long way; and despite temptations to outsource the work to AI, chatGPT can't provide that touch.
If in doubt, you can always offer to give something and that will usually resonate. If you have something free / half off / etc. you can give away, share, etc. it'll help build trust that you're not doing this to make money (even though, strictly speaking, you are). For the 1 product you give away, you should be generating lots more clicks back.
Follow a 4:1 rule. Each time you make a comment trying to sell your product, you should be making at least 4 authentic comments that are unrelated to selling your product. Feel free to engage/comment in other parts of Reddit that interest you personally between commenting for work-purposes.

Example Reply

If someone is asking for recommendations for a contractor to renovate a bathroom, and you own a contracting company called Joe’s Bathrooms, you could say…

"The last 3 customers I did bathroom renos for cost $250/sqft for modern finishes, took 3 weeks from start to finish, and here are some pics. My name is Joe, I did those renovations myself. I’ll DM you my number if you want to call about your project. And let me be clear, you don't have to book with us, just promise me you'll use a certified contractor - you can always ask for their license to prove that it's not a renovation scam."

Let’s review:

✅The question was answered
✅A reference for the expertise knowledge was provided
✅Relevant, unique stats and numbers were included
✅Space was provided to engage back.

Reply Tactics To Avoid:

Firstly, don’t violate subreddit policies (always check with your particular subreddit; some don't allow external links for example).
Don’t drop coupons / promo codes / try to direct sell unless someone is specifically asking for promo codes for your product.
Don’t use template answers. Reddit users will check your comment history, notice this, and call you out in a bad way.
When linking, don't just provide 1 link if you do want to link; it looks like self promotion. instead, per the above, link a variety of options - say like a low cost, mid-market, and high quality option, where you're one of the options. Also, don't insert tracked links; moderators who catch this may ban you.
Don’t blindly trust AI generated answers; they don't perform as well historically as authentic human answers. It's better to spend the first 10 or so comments writing posts by hand to figure out what works best.
No astroturfing, which is pretending to be a customer instead of your own brand. Avoid it by using an official branded employee account or brand account.
Reminder: It's illegal to avoid disclosing the relationship between a brand and its employee online. The simplest way to avoid any astroturfing is to respond from a branded account.
Don't just respond to the threads that let you sell. Even if someone is just looking for advice, these are great opportunities to build your Reddit brand. You should respond to all types of content; it's why we send you some adjacent content to your thought leadership space. It helps you earn trust in the community.

Hall of Shame

Context: When Star Wars Battlefront 2 was released, fans of the series were furious at the level of micro-transactions in the game.

Seriously? I paid 80$ to have Vader locked?

The author wrote:

This is a joke. I'll be contacting EA support for a refund... I can't even playing fucking Darth Vader?!?!? Disgusting. This age of "micro-transactions" has gone WAY too far. Leave it to EA though to stretch the boundaries.

The EA Community Team Responded

The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.

As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we're looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.

We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets.

Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as we can.

This comment is the most downvoted comment in Reddit history, and earned EA a record setting negative 667,000 Karma.

How to Improve This

Brand Voice: Contrary to the guide which recommends branded accounts, EA walked in already having a bad reputation on Reddit. They responded from the official EA account / brand voice. No matter what you write, this brand voice won't work until your reputation is fixed.

Instead.... It's almost always best in tough situations like this to respond as the human at the company rather than the company itself. As for who to bring, choose the right person with the right authority to defend this decision to the comments section to engage with this post. It ought to be the person that has the power to change this decision. Someone C-Level ideally.

Content: This content, coupled with the brand voice, comes across like "I'm telling you I'm listening, but I'm not really listening." Saying things like "our team", "we", etc. implies that nobody is going to actually be accountable. The account stopped responding shortly after this post; proving Reddit right that nobody would actually be here owning the relationship & fixing the issue.

Instead... With the key decision maker present, you have an opportunity to prove that you do care and listen to community feedback. A simple answer could have been:

Hey, this is EA CFO Blake Jorgensen. I'm not on Reddit often but I've come to bargain with you all. First off, locking them behind a lootbox was a mistake. I'm going to undo it. By the end of next week, we're going to release Vader & the core Star Wars IP from the lootbox system. I want our devs to continue to create content for this game so we can have fun for years to come, and that's going to mean prioritizing the userbase over short term profits. We're here for the long haul, so my compromise is that new heroes we develop from here on out will be available to earn via playing or via purchase. That's fair IMO. If we're paying devs for extra work, you can show us you want it by continuing to play. Thanks for sharing candid feedback. Let's build something great. -Blake.

If Blake listened to his community & heard them out, he could have avoided nearly $3.1B of EA stock price being wiped out overnight due to Reddit backlash. Star Wars Battlefront 2 sold less than half of the expected sales, which cost EA another $500M of lost revenue. All of this happened because of this one single comment.

More Shame

Hall of Fame

Context: Microsoft fixed a 5-year-old Windows Defender bug that was killing Firefox performance

Too many calls to the Windows kernel were stealing 75% of Firefox's thunder

An engineer at Mozilla employee wrote:

Please always remain critical of what you read online. ghacks shared wrong details about this bug fix, which other articles have copied without checking the source.

The impact of this fix is that on all computers that rely on Microsoft Defender's Real-time Protection feature (which is enabled by default in Windows), MsMpEng.exe will consume much less CPU than before when monitoring the dynamic behavior of any program through ETW. Nothing less, nothing more.

For Firefox this is particularly impactful because Firefox (not Defender!) relies a lot on VirtualProtect (which is monitored by MsMpEng.exe through ETW). We expect that on all these computers, MsMpEng.exe will consume around 75% less CPU than it did before when it is monitoring Firefox. This is really good news. Unfortunately it is not the news that is shared in this article.

Source: I am the Mozilla employee who isolated this performance issue and reported the details to Microsoft.

This comment was very popular with the community. The engineer’s authentic engagement caused this thread to skyrocket to the top post of Reddit that day, earning over 16,400 karma.

Here's what worked:

Brand Voice: The person identifies themselves as the person who fixed the bug at Mozilla. It literally couldn't get more authentic than this.

You might be wondering… Does this mean my brand's voice doesn't matter?

Not necessarily, but in many cases, the expert's personal account is going to provide much more of an impact than the brand's account. It matters to bring the right authority to the conversation. You can always use a brand account and have the expert sign / include credentials in their response that it's them personally on the brand's account .

Content: The user contributes to the discussion by posting their expert take/advice on the topic. Nothing more, nothing less. It's engaging because it's correct, helpful, accurate, and concise.

Anything Mozilla could have done better? They could have also come here from their own personal brand account to say something. Their expert (i.e. /u/yjuglaret) has created an invitation for Mozilla to come and participate in a discussion where they are being celebrated.

More Fame

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