It’s a been a little while since we took a deep dive into a channel. This time, let’s try Reddit! In case you didn’t know, as of July 2024 Brandwatch has a direct “firehose” into Reddit, offering richer metadata and direct Reddit access. 

Operators, what you need to know:

• If you search for subreddit:nameofsubreddit you will return a list of authors who posted in that subreddit in the last 30 days 
• You don’t need to include r/ with the operator 
• subreddits names are case-sensitive, so is this operator 
• For Reddit, we use the operators parentPostId and rootPostId instead of engagingWithGuid

Our Firehose connection to Reddit pulls *everything*, this mention in r/cars is 5 levels deep, for example. 

 subreddit:cars 
"BMW" AND "subscription service"  

URL Format Change: Prevents breaking the Single Mention View. Clients must update their queries/filters, ideally using the guid operator. 

Any client using the url operator to query or filter Reddit content will need to update their query/filter.  An alternative to using the url operator is to use guid, which is the recommended method of calling the content. (Using the example below, guid:1eb8enf.)To give an example of the change, where we once received the url format 
https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1eb8enf/trying_the_finger_test_on_a_brand_new_chevy/ 

Should be replaced with:

https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1eb8enf 

Engagement score & finding Reddit Communities

Consumer Research users can now use Engagement Score Broken Down by Top Sub-Reddits. It should be useful for the following reasons; 

• Instantly find subreddits within your Query based on Engagement 

• Help you find emerging and active communities to tailor comms, advertise and engage with 

• No longer are you wasting time finding a community/subreddit to work with! Discover it in seconds.

Try Engagement Score vs Top Sub-Reddits over time: Great for being able to spot what emerging community is worth your time! You can then of course create a list of these and begin to dive into the data that way too.

Engagement score Benchmark Component can help you understand where conversations and interactions are taking place.

Finding Influential Redditors

Found a Community of interest? Now you can think about finding redditors of interest.

Did you know you can search for Reddit authors (bio descriptions) in Social Panels editor, similar to how you searched for X authors. 

Consider using Author Karma and/or Reddit Score, to identify those speaking with authority in the subreddit, by setting a Minimum value. 

If the subreddit in question has a moderating system that involves applying Author and/or Post Flair to, this can help you identify a number of user attributes depending on the system in place eg location as shown in the example below.

To do this, find the Columns drop down in the Mentions widget. 

Here are a few other examples of how you might see flair used:

• In a subreddit about a football team, user flair might show which player is your favourite.

• In a subreddit for asking questions, post flair might show if the question has been answered.

• In a subreddit for a video game, user flair might show off your in-game rank or achievements.

Trend Identification 

Reddit is a great source of trends and category level insights. 

You could do a quick query around the category in Brandwatch Search then filter by Reddit for some instant insights without using any mentions at all. 

If you then save this query with the Reddit filter switched on you won’t be using as many mentions as you would do a broader query and you could then develop further by using the Top Subreddits component to find some specific subreddits and create a secondary query looking at all mentions from those subreddits. This is great as you’re not biasing the data by using any specific terms in your query, you’re just collecting everything from those subreddits - perfect for seeing new trends! 

Here’s an example that started with a query for “Frizzy Hair”

So on this topic I’d maybe create a query like this subreddit:(wavyhair OR curlyhair OR curlygirl) which would give me a nice clean dataset as everything would be on topic. 

This also works with just one Subreddit in a lot of cases.