Last week, a SEC Newgate digital colleague told an audience of Labour Party parliamentary staff that Reddit should be included in the mix of channels on which politicians seek to communicate with their electorates.

This week, PoliticsHome reported that the UK government has set up an account on Reddit and is actively posting on the platform. Coincidence? Yes, although we’d have loved to have taken credit for that one.

The government’s decision to actively participate on Reddit reflects our view that it is becoming an important communication channel for both organisations and individuals. Even just a few years ago, Reddit was still a niche platform with some interesting communities but little influence outside its user-base.

Early hints of its potential to influence were visible in 2021 when r/wallstreetbets (a Reddit community that describes itself as being “like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal”) worked together to raise the share price of GameStop. This caused a short squeeze as short-selling hedge funds rushed to cover their positions as some made losses in the billions of dollars.

This generated significant attention from media and politicians and the story became the film Dumb Money.

But the company’s growth story was accelerated by a February 2024 partnership with Google, which gave the search giant’s AI models access to Reddit’s user content as training data, followed by an IPO in March of the same year. By the end of 2024, Reddit was estimated to have 1.1 billion monthly unique visitors and the number of posts on the site has quadrupled since 2018.

Many of those reading posts are not regular Reddit users, indeed many aren’t even registered with the platform. Reddit’s partnership with Google has transformed its visibility on the world’s most used search engine. Ask any simple, conversational question in the Google search bar and the chances are you’ll get at least one Reddit thread on page one of search results. Ask something more specific or technical and you might get a whole page of them, with Reddit often outranking more credible and authoritative sources that have lower domain authority.

So why should corporations be thinking about Reddit? For the same reason that governments are taking it seriously. Social media sites mainly invite participants to follow accounts to gain regular access to their posts. Platforms like X and Facebook will also show you content it thinks you want to see, but ultimately they are often asking you to opt in and actively follow an account to receive information over time. Reddit provides spaces where people discuss a topic because they are interested in the topic, not because they follow a specific user who is talking about it.

That is why the UK Government is attempting to seize the moment, posting news into forums which will be most interested in it and keen to discuss it. Initial posts from the official government account include sharing content into the 26,000-member r/nhs community (“UK Government’s Great British Energy to cut energy bills for hospitals and schools by installing solar panels”), targeting geo-specific and interest subreddits r/kent (57k members) and r/drivingUK (98k members) with news that the Lower Thames Crossing has been approved for construction and announcing funding for improvements to northern rail services into Reddit communities for Manchester (412k members), York (42k), Leeds (82k) and Huddersfield (27k).

There are four key opportunities for corporates:

1. Emulate this strategy, raising awareness of their brand by sharing insight and thought leadership — anything too sales-focused will likely be turfed out by the moderators.

2. Take advantage of Reddit’s advertising platform which can target visitors to relevant communities with sponsored posts.

3. We are seeing an increasing number of journalists and opinion formers on the platform, with some sharing their stories into communities and engaging with the comments.

4. Maintaining visibility in a changing search environment. AI chatbots are fast replacing (and in some cases enhancing) search engines, and we are regularly seeing Reddit posts referenced in the answers they provide.

Reddit has been around for twenty years so if your business has looked at it, tried it without success or dismissed it in the past, I recommend giving it another look. What was once niche is starting to become an essential part of a digital communications strategy.