AMA with Krista Doyle on Reddit Best Practices

Krista Doyle is a Reddit growth & community strategist with 10+ years experience in SEO, content, and community at companies like Twitter, Jasper, and HubSpot. Last year, she straddled the AEO and Community teams at HubSpot, helping them build their Reddit strategy from scratch. She recently founded Two Good Boys & Co, a Reddit growth agency focused on helping brands tame the cultural juggernaut that is Reddit for AI search and community building initiatives.

Getting Started on Reddit

Q: My team has been tasked with "figuring out Reddit" as a social channel. Other than monitoring and listening, what are the first steps you'd advise?

A: Yes! Monitoring and listening are great. It sounds like you have lots of room for now getting into the engagement side of things! The biggest thing I advise to get started with the actual engagement is to identify where you should be engaging and really understand the landscape of those subreddits. It's not going to hurt you long term to take a couple weeks really learning the ropes of your chosen subreddits before jumping into the conversation.

I have two articles I think might be super helpful in terms of actual, tactical steps once you've identified your subreddit ecosystem:

Organic engagement on Reddit goes into detail on how to identify opportunities and the do's and don'ts of participating in Reddit culture as a brand.

Reddit for AI search visibility gets into the nitty gritty of how to then use organic engagement to increase your visibility in AI search.

A lot more than five steps in there, but hopefully you find it helpful!

Q: What's your #1 tip for very small or solo marketing teams on Reddit who don't have much bandwidth?

A: Small teams can totally do well on Reddit! The most important factor is first figuring out the opportunity (i.e. is it worth your time if you're strapped for resources) and then starting small.

I actually wrote about how teams can get started doing this! This covers how teams can identify whether or not they should be investing in Reddit, and lots of tips for starting small and doing organic engagement the right way. Even starting with one account just a few hours a week can pay dividends over the long term.

Team Structure and Resources

Q: How is Reddit typically structured within a company—who owns it, who contributes, is it all internal?

A: The structure can vary a bit based on your specific team and resources. For most teams I work with it's a cross-functional channel with major stakeholders from SEO, socials, and community, with some kind of outside support.

A typical structure might look like:

• Owner: Community lead
• Stakeholders: SEO lead, Social lead
• Strategy/execution help (if needed): External consultant or agency

The owner may look different based on your team priorities, but I always suggest having it be a joint effort touched by Community, Socials, and SEO.

Q: Is there anything we should be asking you that we are not asking?

A: Something I never hear teams talk about is forming a Reddit advocacy program. Tapping into your internal employees/leaders + your power users via a structured program can be a great way to scale your Reddit efforts while keeping them white hat and above board.

Account Strategy and Warmup

Q: Should you outsource to an agency to avoid being flagged as an obvious marketing campaign?

A: An agency can for sure be helpful if you're strapped for internal resources, but I'd ask a lot of questions about the methods they use to weed out shady tactics. I'd look for an agency that can work with you or someone internal to post authentically from accounts that the brand owns. You don't want to work with someone who promises a bunch of mentions from a network of anonymous contractor accounts—that is very risky and will almost always get you in hot water.

Q: What about new accounts getting flagged immediately for having no karma points?

A: For sure! Most of the good agencies will include "account warmup" as part of their services. This ensures that:

1. You own your accounts and stay in control of them long term
2. Issues/risks are minimized, because the Reddit experts at the agency are helping you get the accounts warmed up and in good standing.

Q: How do you handle pushback that a 3-6 month warmup is too much time investment for an internal team?

A: I would say a solid warmup plan can take about 90 days, BUT what I would also say is that you'll also be seeing small wins along the way. So, yes, it takes a bit of time up front, but you'll also be seeing progress as soon as you start commenting on threads around the two-week mark.

Here's a timeline I always like to review with clients to show that progress does happen along the way, and real results start surfacing sooner than you think if you're consistent with those first 90 days:

Realistic progression for a brand doing this right:

1. Months 1-3: You're warming up the account, building community familiarity, getting a few upvotes here and there. Mostly quiet. This is normal.
2. Months 3-6: Your comments are getting more traction. You're recognized as a helpful voice in your subreddits. Maybe your brand name starts appearing in threads organically (not just when someone is complaining).
3. Months 6-12: You're being cited in AI search results. Positive brand sentiment is measurably better. You've probably handled a piece of negative feedback publicly and it actually went well. The flywheel is starting to spin.
4. Year 2+: Reddit is a meaningful, compounding asset for your brand. You've built real community trust. Your reputation in AI search is influenced by your own voice, not just what others say about you.

That's not a quick win. But the brands that make it past that 6-month mark and on to compounding results? They're really hard to displace.

And I'd also say that even an hour per day to start can go a long way in proving out some success!

Q: What are the different strategies on Reddit for B2B SMB clients? When should you create a branded community, use personal vs. company profiles, engage in external communities, or target threads showing up in Google and AI?

A: For branded and unbranded communities, this will come down to two things:

• Is there a need for an owned community?
• Do you have the resources and time to manage a community you create?

The teams that benefit most from a branded subreddit are usually larger companies with lots of existing presence on Reddit and huge customer bases + have the internal resources to consistently manage it (e.g. HubSpot). I typically recommend that brands just getting started with Reddit focus on external subreddits first while they're gaining traction.

What would make you need an owned community? I would say if you're at a brand with lots of existing presence on Reddit (i.e. people are already organically talking about you all the time) and huge customer bases, an owned/branded subreddit would likely be worth the investment.

For personal versus company profiles, I'd suggest both! You'll want some flexibility in how you engage. There are certain threads that may benefit from an official team account, and others that may benefit more from a more personal account from the founder or an employee.

Regarding engaging in external communities: Engage always! This should be where you start and where you will see the most progress while you're building traction on Reddit.

Regarding targeting threads showing up in Google and AI: This one comes down to age of the thread. I typically don't recommend trying to comment on a thread older than four months. It can be a spam signal. But if a newer thread is showing up and you can add value, that's fair game!

Measuring Success

Q: What's the best way to track and measure Reddit success when starting at zero? I want to clearly communicate ROI back to my team.

A: This is one of THE most common questions I get. I actually wrote about this earlier this week! This article shows you how to track and measure success of an organic Reddit program + gives a realistic timeline for how long it should take to see success.

Q: How do you measure Reddit's specific impact on AI visibility over time? AI traffic increases are usually consolidated across all sources, and UTM parameters only show direct Reddit traffic. How do we isolate Reddit's contribution to showing up in AI-generated answers?

A: Great question, and one that everyone has right now! I will say in all honesty, there is not a 100% amazing way to do this right now specifically for Reddit, but here are some tools that I've found really helpful because they do allow you to single out Reddit citations and dig into them a little deeper:

• Peec AI
• Profound
• I think AirOps just released this functionality

The tools are helpful, but I suggest keeping a master spreadsheet of the prompts you're targeting using Reddit, and manually track visibility impact specifically from Reddit citations over time.

Ethical Reddit Marketing

Q: What does "ethical" Redditing look like for marketers? I've been conflicted about doing marketing in a place where marketing doesn't belong. Most B2B Reddit strategies feel like spam in disguise.

A: I honestly think of ethical Redditing as a more casual version of how a brand might do employee or customer advocacy on LinkedIn. If I'm running Reddit for a brand, my ethical strategy would include:

• Accounts that we own and are transparent about our brand affiliation
• In-house employees and leaders getting involved and sharing expertise
• Enabling power users who are familiar with Reddit to engage
• Humor! Personality! A huge way to combat that "marketing" feeling is to just...strip away the marketing. Your goal is to show up, engage, build community with the people in the space. If your profile/handle is transparent about where you work, you're not gonna have to drop mentions every five seconds, you can just focus on having interesting conversations and letting that lead to results.

Q: How do you market on Reddit transparently without getting hate from Redditors? How can you use a branded account without them hating it?

A: I wrote a bit about organic engagement do's and don'ts in my latest newsletter that might be helpful. The key is being transparent about your brand affiliation and focusing on adding value rather than selling.

Reddit for AI Search

Q: What's up with the Reddit LLM / search engine? Do you ever use it?

A: It's so new, but I am bullish on it having a really interesting impact on the AI search ecosystem. I think they're gonna invest a lot in this moving forward to be a major player in that space!

Just for Fun

Q: What are your favorite subreddits?

A: r/AITA always makes for some good "wtf" moments, and r/TodayILearned is always interesting! Also any subreddit for a TV show or podcast you love is always gonna provide for some good entertainment. I got hooked on Landman last month and the Landman subreddit was insane.

Want to learn more about Reddit marketing? Subscribe to Krista's newsletter /r/theWarmups and connect with her on LinkedIn.

Photo from Brett Jordan on Unsplash.