Reddit is a great tool for the promotion of all kinds of media—including YouTube—but it can be a little tricky to wrap your head around, as it’s not always as simple as just posting a link to your video and hoping for upvotes.
While many YouTubers do try to take advantage of Reddit for the promotion of their videos, many more don’t, and plenty of those who do use Reddit don’t use it to its full potential.
So, in this post, we’re going to walk you through how to promote YouTube videos on Reddit, so that you can get the most out of this very useful platform.
Good Content
Reddit promotes content by user vote, with users being able up or down vote anything that is shared on the platform, from YouTube videos to comments.
You should be striving to make the best possible content regardless, but it should be noted that if your content is not good, Reddit will not be an effective medium for promoting your videos. You will get some traffic in most cases—assuming you follow the guide below—but you won’t be getting anywhere near the potential traffic that Reddit can promote if your content isn’t good enough to persuade Reddit users to upvote you.
Research
With Reddit being, at its core, a link-sharing platform, many people fall into the trap of thinking that just getting a link to their video on the platform will be enough to start driving traffic to their channel. Unfortunately, there’s a little more to it than that.
You will need to pick appropriate subreddits to post your video to, otherwise there will be little-to-no engagement with the link. And to find those appropriate subreddits, you need to do a little research.
Head over to Reddit and search for the main keywords associated with your video. Be sure to search a few relevant keywords that are sufficiently different from each other to give an accurate result. What you’re looking for is subreddits that show up in the search results for each of your keywords—these will be your target subreddits.
Read the Rules
Before even thinking about posting a YouTube link in a subreddit—especially one you have just joined—make sure you carefully read the rules of that subreddit. Many of them have strict rules about self-promotion, which can vary from requiring you to clearly tag a post as self-promotion to outright banning self-promotion.
These rules are not Reddit rules, but rules enforced by the admins of those specific subreddits. This means that the worst consequences you will face for breaking those rules is being kicked out of that subreddit, not Reddit itself. That being said, if you’ve identified a subreddit as a good fit for promoting your content, you don’t want to get kicked out of it!
Contribute
We understand this pointer won’t be ideal if you are looking at promoting your videos now, but a proper strategy for promoting your content was always going to be a long term plan.
Reddit is a community. Actually it’s a series of communities. If you manage to find subreddits that are an ideal fit for your content, and then just hop in there and start posting links to your videos, it’s going to get a negative reaction, even if you are following the subreddit’s rules to the letter.
Try to spend some time in those subreddits, commenting on posts, sharing relevant links that aren’t self-promotional, and generally building up a standing with the members there. There is no hard rule for how long you should spend doing this as every community is different, but at the very least you should spend a couple of weeks getting to know the community before promoting videos to them.
Share Your Video
By now you should have found some subreddits who are a good fit for your content, spent a while getting to know everyone and introducing yourself to the community, and thoroughly read the rules regarding posting self-promotional links.
It’s time to post.
The best method is to get your video in as many places as possible—without going against any of the guides laid out above. As long as the subreddit is relevant, allows this type of post, and you haven’t just popped in out of the blue to post your link, you should consider sharing your video there. The more people who see it, the more people are likely to click it.
Treat it as an Ongoing Process
If you don’t have the stamina or interest to keep being part of the Reddit communities you have joined, Reddit may not be the best promotional tool for you. A mistake many YouTubers make when trying to promote through Reddit is in doing all of the above, and then slipping back into a purely promotional cycle and only posting links to their videos, nothing else.
While the communities will react better to your promotional links if they know you and feel as though you are a legitimate member, rather than someone just there to promote videos, that friendly sentiment will soon evaporate if you stop participating in the community but continue promoting your videos there.
Final Thoughts
Reddit, like any other social media platform, is an excellent tool for promoting YouTube videos… if you use it correctly. Each major social media platform exists because it is different in many ways to the other major social media platforms.
Facebook and Twitter can co-exist because they are not competing with each other—Twitter is used in an entirely different way to Facebook. But with these different uses comes different strategies for using those platforms for promotion. The trick, from a YouTuber’s point of view, is learning what those strategies are for each platform, and implementing them correctly.
Reddit is no exception. Reddit is used in a very specific way that is unique to Reddit among the big social media platforms, so when you look to promote your content there, be sure to treat it differently to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or any of the other big players.
Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube
Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.
1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search
I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.
Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!
2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos
I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.
When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.
Big mistake!
I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.
That is why I took the plunge and invested in my editing and design process with Adobe Creative Suite. They offer a WIDE range of tools to help make amazing videos, simple to use tools for overlays, graphics, one click tools to fix your audio and the very powerful Photoshop graphics program to make eye-catching thumbnails.
Best of all you can get a free trial for 30 days on their website, a discount if you are a student and if you are a regular human being it starts from as little as £9 per month if you want to commit to a plan.
3. Rev.com helps people read my videos
You can’t always listen to a video.
Maybe you’re on a bus, a train or sat in a living room with a 5 year old singing baby shark on loop… for HOURS. Or, you are trying to make as little noise as possible while your new born is FINALLY sleeping.
This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.
Rev.com can help you translate your videos, transcribe your videos, add subtitles and even convert those subtitles into other languages – all from just $1.50 per minute.
A GREAT way to find an audience and keep them hooked no matter where they are watching your content.
4. Learn new skills for FREE with Skillshare
I SUCK reading books to learn, but I LOVE online video courses.
Every month I learn something new. Editing, writing, video skills, how to cook, how to run a business – even how to meditate to calm a busy mind.
I find all of these for FREE with Skillshare – Sign up, pick all the courses you want and cancel anytime you need.
5. Shutterstock helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways
I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.
And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.
I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.
I can talk about skydiving, food, money, kids, cats – ANYTHING I WANT – with a quick search on the Shutterstock website I can find a great looking clip to overlay on my videos, keeping them entertained and watching for longer.
They have a wide library of videos, graphics, images and even a video maker tool and it wont break the bank with plans starting from as little as £8.25 ($9) per month.
