By Griffin Moores | A storyteller with a strategist’s brain, Griffin Moores is a communications specialist with CSU’s Office of Engagement and Extension, where he helps turn the complex into the approachable. He loves audience-first messaging, testing new ideas, and reducing the distance between experts and the people they serve.

At first, Reddit can look chaotic (and honestly, it often is). But! It’s also one of the most direct ways to connect with your specific audience and be of value to them. 

Over the last year, I’ve been testing Reddit as a channel for CSU Extension and am sharing what I’ve learned to spark ideas for other campus communicators who want to explore new ways of reaching people. 

The simplest lesson from the experiment: it pays to be helpful.  

When we show up to help, and commit time to answering questions and sharing research-backed resources, people notice. Through this approach, we’ve been able to meaningfully improve our reach and engagement over the past year, with over 2 million post impressions and 2,000+ post comments (yes, I do like to talk, but I swear it’s not all me).  

What follows are my field notes from a year of successes and failures using Reddit for CSU Extension. 

Field Note 1: Reddit isn’t one audience, it’s hundreds of micro-communities 

Reddit is a network of topic-based communities created by Reddit users. These communities are called subreddits, and are preceded by “r/”. For example, r/Denver, r/Gardening, r/DenverGardener, r/CSUFoCo and so on.  

Each subreddit has its own rules and volunteer moderators. The primary factors impacting post performance and visibility are: upvotes, downvotes, comments and how recently it was shared. 

Each community has its own norms, and trust is earned through repeatedly showing up, sharing relevant content and being responsive to comments. But, if you are sharing relevant content, you can still parachute in to drop information as long as it isn’t too spammy and you watch your notifications to answer folks’ questions.  

Observations 

• A post that performs well in one community can flop (or get removed) in another. 

• The “best” content often looks like a well-written comment, not a campaign asset. 

• People like to talk on Reddit. We average about 10 comments per post, more than 3 times our average on Facebook with similar content.  

How I messed this up 

• One day I was moving a little too fast and shared a post about how to keep your grass healthy to r/NoLawns instead of r/lawncare. Whoops! They were (mostly) good sports about it, and it resulted in a few good conversations about resource-efficient lawn care, but it could have gone better. Let this be a reminder that what you share – and how you share it – should be tailored to each subreddit’s interests, values, and expectations of what “good” content looks like.   

Field Note 2: People come for answers, not ads 

One of the biggest reasons people come to Reddit is to crowdsource answers to their questions (and for the occasional meme). For Extension, that’s a natural match because our resources are already being shared on Reddit, with or without us.   

Observations 

• The fastest way to lose trust is to drop in with a hard sell for why people should do x, y or z without tailoring your message to a community’s needs and interests, or not sticking around long enough to answer people’s questions. 

• Text-first responses with detailed info can outperform link-first, shorter posts. The average length of a Reddit post is much longer than the average Facebook or Instagram post.  

Tip 

• One way to tailor posts to the specific community – especially if they’re organized around the topic you’re sharing resources about – is to break the fourth wall when sharing a post and ask them for their feedback. This can both show you’re open to learning from them and generate real insights that can be taken back to your subject matter experts.  

Field Note 3: You don’t need a big following to have a big reach 

This is perhaps the biggest difference between Reddit and traditional platforms: Your reach isn’t really tied to the number of followers you have. Instead, your visibility is tied to the quality of your content and the size/activity of the subreddits you choose to share in.  

Field Note 4: “Success” is what you make it 

Reddit performance changes dramatically from subreddit to subreddit. So, understanding what your goals are makes it much easier to define success. For instance, are you looking to get as much visibility as possible, or are you trying to build community and trust with a few niche audiences?  

For example 

The subreddit where we have the highest engagement rate is r/DenverGardener, which has about 8,000 weekly visitors. This community is both geographically and topically aligned with a large chunk of our resources, making it a natural fit for us.  

In that r/DenverGardener, we’ve built up trust by engaging in helpful ways with the community, resulting in a bit more latitude when we share our promotional resources, allowing us to get traction on paid programs instead of just free webinars.  

However, if we’re just trying to get attention on our free webinars, groups like r/lawncare, with 300k weekly visitors, can offer a lot of eyes if the topic lines up.  

Field Note 5: How to post without it being removed (or downvoted) 

Beyond understanding the unique audiences in different subreddits, the biggest operational challenge is aligning your posts with different subreddit-specific rules and keeping up with comment responses. 

Regarding the rules, if you follow a few basic guidelines you should be able to stay in the clear: 

• Avoid anything that looks like “spam” or pure “promotion,” which includes sharing links without trying to initiate or participate in a discussion. Language can play a big role in how a resource is received.  

• Don’t use overt marketing language (“limited spots,” “act now,” “best ever,” etc.) 

• Be transparent about affiliation and why you’re sharing something. I’ll often break the 4th wall and tell people I’m a communications specialist with CSU Extension and would be happy to answer questions/route questions I can’t answer to the appropriate expert.  

• Be careful with paid events. Though, if your events are like ours, they’re usually well under market rate, so making the educational/public-service value obvious can make it seem less like overt promotion/sales. If there are scholarships and/or free alternatives, mention them.  

• If a post gets removed or you get negative feedback, treat it as data not a failure! You’re still a good person, you might just have to revisit your approach.  

• When uncertain, message the moderators first 

Pro tip: Many subreddits have built in spam filtering, with opaque rules and triggers blocking certain types of links or certain keywords. However, if you’re sharing a resource that you believe is truly relevant and useful to a community and it’s automatically rejected, a quick message to the moderators will often lead them to manually restore the post. This also helps build trust that you’re a real person, and sometimes can lead to elevated permissions for your account to reduce auto-mod actions in the future.

Field Note 6: Leverage your experts and expertise 

Reddit (and social media in general) can be a great way to reduce the “distance” between your subject matter experts and community members. There are a ton of ways to do this, but pretty much all of them require engaging with your experts. There are two primary ways I’ve done this:  

• Sending questions from Reddit to our experts for their response, which you can use to answer those questions on the expert’s behalf.  

• Hosting Ask Me Anything sessions where one or more experts pick a day and time to answer as many questions on a given topic as they can.  

The Final Note 

If there’s a single takeaway from this year on Reddit, it’s that the secret sauce is simple: show up, listen, and be helpful.  

It takes time, but it can pay off faster than you’d expect.  

If you’re a campus communicator curious about Reddit, start small: pick one or two subreddits that genuinely overlap with your audience, learn the rules and commit to being helpful for a few weeks before you try to “promote” anything. 

Reddit doesn’t reward polish as much as it rewards presence. So, what are you waiting for? Jump in and give it a shot!