Typically when we introduce clients to Reddit for sourcing relevant news articles and hot topics the normal response is “Are you serious?.” Whether it’s due to Reddit’s plain-jane look, WTF-esque stories or its dark & twisted sub-reddits, people new to the site simply don’t think our recommendation is a good idea — until they try it. With proper set-up, you’ll be using Reddit to find Tweetable/Facebookable/Bloggable content in no time at all, and you’ll like it – we guarantee.

Simply follow these simple steps then check the site when in a pinch and looking for some content to keep your social accounts fresh:

1) Set Up An Account & Clear It Out

An account is free and takes 15 seconds to set up, so get moving. The next thing you’ll want to do is click the little ‘edit’ button in the top right of the page. This will take you to your “reddits” pages where you can choose to subscribe to a variety of subreddits. Whats’s a subreddit you may ask? Well, i’s a small community of targeted posts within Reddit. One of the nice features of Reddit is that you can customize what you see and keep non-targeted content out of your stream.

Look for “Your Front Page Reddits” in the right side of the page. These are the top subreddits and new users are auto-subscribed to them to give them content for their site. You’ll want to work with a clean slate so unsubscribe to them all until you have no subscriptions.

2) Identify & Find Topics Make Sense For Your Audience

You should know what type of content will work with your audience. This sounds straightforward, but it’s important. Some of it’s easy. If you are a Buffalo News Organization your social followers may be interested in General Buffalo Info, Upstate New York,  New York, Rochester, NYS Politics, Buffalo State, Bills and Sabres subreddits. If you’re running social media for a law firm, it might be Law, Insurance, CyberLaws, Law School, Law Firm and Tax subreddits.

One you’ve though about content that your audience will like, it’s time to find what subreddits actually exist. It should be noted that not all subreddit have as much following as another. When landing on a subreddit you can always look to the top left to subscribe and also see the overall number of readers as well as the users currently active on the site. One way to find subreddits is to use the Reddits page and search for relevant subreddits. However a better way is to use third party tools to help you find subreddits. Some tools to use are:

• RedditList
• Subreddit Explorer
• Subreddit Suggester
• Subreddit Finder

These tools will help you search Reddit for related areas that may make sense for your business. If you find a subreddit that works, simply hit the subscribe button.

3) Use Subscribed Reddits For Reccomendations

Once you have a few subreddits that you subscribe to, you can look to them to do the heavy lifting. Jump to each of the subreddits and look to the right side of the page. Many moderators will suggest similar pages or more niche subreddits that you can quickly subscribe to. Here’s a look at the sports subreddit:

This is a common courtesy that most mods provide, so hop around from subreddit to subreddit and subscribe to everything that may make sense for your social accounts.

4) Check Back When You Need Content Ideas

What you’ve created with the above steps is a customized feed of popular stories that closely relate to your social media accounts. Whenever looking for news, simply shoot over to Reddit and your homepage will exist of content only submitted to your subscribed subreddits. If you’ve executed the steps above correctly you’ll now only see relevant content like this setup we use for health-based social accounts:

Ideally, you’ll now see a handful of relevant links to your social accounts. While not all of the links will be worthy, but you’ll receive aggregated content from all sites across the web. You may have to do a bit of digging, but in our experience this will be a great start to finding sharable content.

Did this work for you? We’d love for you to try this for a week and comment below about your results!