It’s a cautionary tale replayed endlessly across one of the world’s most influential community-driven platforms.

But for brands, Reddit can no longer be dismissed as a marketing minefield to be avoided. The platform has around 108 million daily unique visitors worldwide, and users spend an average of around 16 minutes consuming content per session — far more time than on many other social platforms.

Perhaps most importantly, the site’s sprawling archive of authentic conversations now serves as one of the primary gatekeepers for AI Search. Google’s $60 million-per-year agreement to license Reddit content signals that this influence is now entrenched at the highest levels of SEO and GEO.

The message for marketers is unambiguous: The rules of digital influence are being drafted on Reddit, whether you’re participating or not.

Reddit Has Traditionally Been Thorny Territory for Brands

Historically, Reddit has been hostile to overt marketing efforts. The graveyard of brand blunders is filled with failed AMAs and cringey misfires: Nissan, REI, and travel ticketing site Skiplagged have been dragged for clumsy attempts at engagement. Electronic Arts’ now-infamous 2017 defense of “pay-to-win” mechanics in Star Wars Battlefront II earned the most downvoted comment in Reddit history.

The platform’s persistent hostility to brands is tied to three deeply structural and cultural dynamics:

1. Authenticity above all. Reddit’s entire ethos centers around authentic, user-first contributions rather than top-down brand messaging.
2. Community-driven scrutiny. Every subreddit has its own culture, rules, and moderators, which means outsiders — especially brands — are expected to adapt seamlessly to the community.
3. Anonymity breeds candor (and crass comments). Under the cloak of anonymity, Redditors can be brutally honest. They won’t hesitate to tell you exactly what they think of your brand, and they have a keen nose for sniffing out inauthenticity.

As a result of all of the above, traditional marketing tactics that may work elsewhere are swiftly rejected here. Marketing-speak is mocked, subtle self-promotion is quickly exposed, and contrived campaigns are dismantled within minutes. (If you want a vivid illustration of this, just head on over to r/HailCorporate, a subreddit dedicated to unmasking brand intrusion.)

Reddit’s upvote/downvote mechanics also impose real-time accountability on content. Public comment and post histories are visible by default — though since June 2025, users can hide it from their profiles. (Moderators, however, retain 28-day access.)

Finally, moderation can be a rude awakening for brands accustomed to sanitized feedback loops. Volunteer moderators enforce each subreddit’s rules publicly and quickly. Missteps can result in instant removal or bans. And unlike platforms where content disappears, Reddit has a long memory: Deleted posts often persist via archives and mirrors, which means that one ill-conceived campaign can haunt a company for years.

2025 Reddit: New Rules, New Tools, New Stakes

All that said, Reddit in 2025 is simply not the same beast it was in 2015. The platform is evolving, both in how it equips brands and in how its culture is shifting under the spotlight of AI search.

New Tools for Marketers

Recently, Reddit itself has signaled openness to brand partnerships and data licensing deals — a perhaps not-unrelated response to the widely publicized revenue struggles leading up to its 2024 IPO.

Whatever the motivation, over the past five years, the platform has rolled out a slew of products that signal a new posture toward brand participation, including:

• Reddit Pro: A native suite of analytics, post scheduling, and community insights to help brands engage more effectively.
• KarmaLab: Reddit’s in-house creative team, built to help brands craft content that won’t instantly get flamed.
• AMA Ads: Launched in 2025, these let brands promote upcoming Ask Me Anythings in relatively “safer spaces” than past free-for-alls.

These tools make it clear that Reddit is building out infrastructure to help brands participate without breaking community norms.

AI Search: Raising the Stakes for Authenticity

Despite the hurdles involved, there’s real urgency for brands to engage with Reddit. If you’re not active on the platform, you’re forfeiting control of how your brand is represented in AI-generated answers. Competitors or critics will happily fill the void.

A few clear indicators of Reddit’s growing influence in digital discovery include:

• AI systems cite Reddit constantly. After OpenAI’s July 2025 update, Reddit citations surged 87% and now account for over 10% of ChatGPT’s references.
• Search engines elevate Reddit threads. Google increasingly surfaces Reddit discussions when users want lived experiences, not polished marketing copy.
• Meritocracy rules. In Reddit’s culture, genuinely helpful contributions — not ad spend or brand size — determine visibility. Smaller, scrappy brands can punch above their weight if they provide genuine value.

The TL;DR: The world’s toughest focus group is now also the training ground for AI, and brands can’t afford to sit it out.

Subtle Cultural Shifts

The culture is also softening, at least in pockets. In certain subreddits, more specialized experts — engineers, academics, clinicians, etc. — are welcomed when they contribute genuine expertise. The implicit bargain is simple: Show up as a person first, a brand rep second.

How Brands Are Experimenting Successfully

Even with the tailwinds created by new tools and shifting community norms, it’s no excuse for brands to fall back on lazy campaigns. Success on Reddit requires a radically different playbook that centers patience, humility, relatability, empathy, and a focus on providing value.

A few brands getting it right:

• The Economist has run thoughtful AMAs with its editors, leaning into expertise rather than pushing subscriptions.
• Mint Mobile earned credibility by having employees (including Ryan Reynolds himself at times) participate directly in r/mintmobile, answering questions and cracking jokes rather than shilling.
• Purple Mattress launched r/LifeOnPurple, a community dedicated to sleep health. Instead of spamming product links, it became a global focus group where users traded advice.

There can be real results tied to these efforts. Mint Mobile, for instance, has seen over 44% of its social media referrals (more than 101,000 visits) come from Reddit.

On the other hand, there are real risks. Brands have very little real control over even the most branded of subreddits; a recent comment on the Purple community, r/LifeOnPurple (headline: “Purple has no moral fiber”) highlights how quickly conversations can turn critical.

Technical Brands and Radical Helpfulness

Technical audiences reward brands that bring real resources to the table. Sharing a GitHub repo, being candid about a failed migration, or troubleshooting alongside users builds more trust than a dozen blog posts.

Imagine for a moment a parallel universe to the scenario at the top of this article. In this alternative outcome, the same company’s lead engineer joins a thread about database performance concerns. She candidly shares the team’s journey migrating 50 million records, drops a link to their GitHub tool, and highlights both successes and setbacks. The community responds positively; screenshots begin circulating on X. Months later, her answer resurfaces when developers search for scaling advice.

This example showcases the real value of Reddit for brands: credibility meets connection at scale. In a world in which AI slop dominates feeds, people are flocking to Reddit presumably because of the very human, messy, and unfiltered exchanges that happen there. By showing up authentically — not aggressively — brands stand to win trust and gain relevance.

Contently helps the world’s top brands create stories that resonate with real people — and stand out to both audiences and AI.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

How do you measure success for brand activity on Reddit?

Engagement looks different on Reddit than on other platforms. Metrics include upvotes/downvotes, comment sentiment, referral traffic, and whether brand posts are organically referenced in other threads. Increasingly, success also means being cited frequently in AI Search results.

Can paid ads work on Reddit, or is organic participation the only path?

Reddit Ads can be effective, but they perform best when paired with authentic community engagement. A promoted AMA or native-style post without organic credibility often falls flat. Brands that invest in both paid reach plus ongoing community presence may see the strongest results.

What types of subreddits are most open to brand participation?

Smaller, niche, interest-driven communities (tech, health, hobbies) tend to be more receptive when brands bring expertise. Large default subreddits like r/funny or r/pics are usually hostile to overt marketing. The key is finding communities where your brand can add value to conversations that are already happening.

The post Reddit’s Resurgence: How the Internet’s Toughest Crowd Became AI’s Favorite Source appeared first on Contently.

“Oh, we’re B2B,” someone said. “We don’t think anyone’s looking for our content on Facebook. We only want to use LinkedIn.”

I hear this response meeting after meeting. I get the instinct to assume LinkedIn is the only worthwhile place to pay for content distribution if you’re a B2B company. LinkedIn has incredible ad targeting for B2B brands. When you’re selling a very specific product (say, enterprise content marketing software) to a very specific buyer, it’s incredibly useful to be able to target someone by job title, location, and company. On any other social network, it’s a crapshoot that people will accurately provide that information. On LinkedIn, it’s pretty much required. If I want to target the CMO of Pepsi with an e-book, LinkedIn is the first place I go.

But B2B marketers don’t eschew other social networks just because they love the targeting LinkedIn provides. They also believe users won’t be interested in work-related content on other social networks—particularly Facebook.

From all the data I’ve seen, the idea that people don’t care about B2B content on Facebook is a myth. Our strategy team runs content analysis for hundreds of niche B2B marketing topics each month, and consistently, we see that people love to share work-related content on Facebook. For topics ranging from demand generation marketing to logistics, Facebook accounts for the majority of shares for specialized B2B content.

This trend shouldn’t come as a surprise. Facebook accounts for over 40 percent of all traffic to publisher sites, eclipsing Google. Over 90 percent of all content sharing occurs on Facebook, compared to just 2.5 percent for LinkedIn. It’s the biggest media empire in the world, and people share and consume every kind of content through the Facebook feed—wedding pictures, political analysis, cat videos, and yes, even white papers and articles about the insurance industry.

While Facebook seems like a network that’s separate from our work lives, it’s really not. Think about the people you engage with most on Facebook. You probably see a ton of content from college classmates and coworkers—the people you’ve spent most of your life with since Facebook came on the scene. These also happen to be individuals who likely have similar professional interests. I don’t think twice about sharing a work-related piece about marketing or tech, because half of my “friends” work in marketing or tech.

If you’re still skeptical about using Facebook for content distribution when you already have LinkedIn, consider these two additional reasons: It’s cheap, and the targeting is really good.

The incredible amount of time that people spend on Facebook (50 minutes per day) means that Facebook has a supply of attention that no competitor can match. In most ad campaigns we’ve run for Contently, Facebook is consistently 10 times cheaper than LinkedIn ($0.20 – $1.00 per click on Facebook versus $2.00 – 10.00 on LinkedIn).

This isn’t to say that marketers should ditch LinkedIn. Far from it. As I’ve written before, one of the biggest problems in content marketing is brands don’t allocate enough of their budget to distribution. They create a ton of content, put it on a blog, and expect people to just show up. But they’d be better served creating fewer stories and investing extra money in paid distribution to ensure their target audience actually reads them. Unless you already have a mature audience and dominate the conversation in your industry, you probably want to allocate at least 25 percent of your budget to content distribution.

That means using LinkedIn and Facebook in conjunction. While LinkedIn only accounts for about 2.5 percent of social shares of all content, it still drives at least 25 percent or more of shares for content focused on B2B topics. Clearly, users look for more work-related content when they’re on LinkedIn. The targeting capabilities are especially helpful if you’re running an account-based marketing program. To oversimplify a bit, the strategy mix I usually recommend looks like this:

Top-of-funnel content: Facebook, since it’s a very efficient way to build an audience.

Gated lead-gen and bottom-funnel content: LinkedIn. When the payoff is bigger, the targeting and context make up for the price tag.

This year, B2B marketers need to experiment more aggressively with paid content distribution. But if they view LinkedIn as their only option, they’ll be doing themselves a disservice. Whether you love or hate Zuckerberg’s empire, it’s still one of the most powerful tools content marketers have.

The post B2B Paid Content Distribution: Facebook vs. LinkedIn appeared first on Contently.

That’s what today’s marketers want: targeted ads that get consumers excited. And increasingly, they’re buying those ads via social.

A new infographic from Kenshoo reveals that social has grown significantly in the marketplace. Marketers are increasing their social spend by 50 percent year over year, and click-through rates have grown 64 percent. The big factors: the rapid evolution of Facebook as an incredibly powerful advertising platform, and the introduction of Instagram ads.

Search is also showing a significant boost, with spend growing by 8 percent year over year. Savvy marketers know that mobile is the best platform for both search and social; in fact, mobile accounts for the majority of growth in paid search spend.

Marketers are also embracing more product listing ads, which have expanded from 8 percent to 26 percent of all search impressions. But most of the product listing ads that catch my eye come from Facebook, which is another testament to the power of social.

Take a look at the infographic below for more insights into marketing trends—and see if you can remember the last social media ad that made you excited to buy.

The post Infographic: 2016’s Biggest Social Advertising Trends appeared first on Contently.

According to Randy Parker, founder of Facebook marketing tech company PagePart, Facebook’s value to your business will depend on how much leverage you get from the social graph. In other words, as long as your business relies on building long-lasting relationships with a reasonably large audience that you can target, Facebook ads are worth a try.

Industry concerns?

That idea even applies to industries with smaller audiences, such as B2B companies. We at Contently are a great example. We use Facebook for targeted paid distribution of our content—the specificity of the targeting and relatively low CPC allow us to reach potential leads and grow our audience effectively.

MetLife has seen similar success on Facebook. According to Facebook’s case study, the insurance company saw a 2.4x increase in lead-to-sale ratio compared to the next best-performing channel, and a 49 percent decrease in cost per lead.

This is true for B2C companies as well. Banana Republic (retail), Zynga (gaming), and Verizon (telecommunications) have all seen success. Your industry shouldn’t determine how much you value Facebook.

Part of a cohesive strategy

Even though it’s effective across industries, Facebook shouldn’t be your only channel. Using it in chorus with the rest of your marketing repertoire is critical.

“I don’t think it’s the most important marketing channel,” said Deacon Webster, CCO at digital agency Walrus. “It completely depends on what your brand is. There’s some brands that I would say one hundred percent shouldn’t be using Facebook. But more and more people are spending time on mobile devices, and if you need to get in front of those people, Facebook’s a really good way to do it.”

Using Facebook in conjunction with other channels is a key part of understanding the platform’s overall place in your marketing plan. For big brands, using Facebook as one part of a larger media campaign can be a valuable way to take advantage of the network’s unique capabilities, while some brands may be better off creating Facebook-only campaigns.

“It’s always good to have a mix of different mediums happening,” Webster said. “People have a different reaction to seeing something on their phone compared to TV or interacting with outdoor or wherever else. I think it’s part of the mix, but it’s not the whole mix.”

Ubisoft, the Montreal-based gaming company, took this to heart in a recent campaign to increase the reach of a TV ad for the launch of its new game. Because its core user base, 18- to 34-year-old males, tends to be less active on TV, Ubisoft used Facebook to extend the effectiveness of its expensive TV ads to the digital sphere.

Brad Goldberg, vice president of of advertising operations at OrionCKB, believes that Facebook should also only be one part of a digital marketing strategy.

“I don’t know if I would say it’s the most important,” he said. “Obviously, you have to have the right mix of different digital strategies because Facebook is still very much a social channel, and is about building a brand. That’s opposed to something on the search side, where people are typing in exactly what they are looking for. You have to have a good kind of mix between the two.”

Goldberg sees Facebook as “top two” in terms of digital importance for marketers, but it’s not necessarily more important than that other behemoth, Google.

Facebook for mobile, targeting, and video

For mobile, targeting, and digital video, it’s hard to beat Facebook. If your marketing goals are tied to those elements, Facebook is your place. Its vast reach makes it appealing for any campaign aiming at a broad audience, while its targeting features make it worthwhile (though somewhat expensive) for a campaign aimed at a very specific one.

As TV slowly dies, Facebook has been positioning itself as the next platform for TV ad money.

Facebook’s video ad push is an excellent example of how these kind of campaigns—targeted, mobile, video-based—are an excellent fit for Facebook, whether you’re using the platform as a supplementary or primary marketing channel.

As TV slowly dies, Facebook has been positioning itself as the next platform for TV ad money. Socialbakers revealed that marketers plan to spend more ad money on Facebook video than on any other platform.

Lexus, for example, recently ran a campaign with an astounding 1,000 unique video ads in order to utilize Facebook’s granular audience targeting features—something that could never be done with a traditional TV ad. Campaigns like this one, which make explicit use of Facebook’s unique features, are worth experimenting with, but otherwise it’s likely best to keep the platform within a larger marketing mix.

Again, this all depends largely on your brand’s idiosyncrasies. Once you understand both Facebook’s evolving model and its place in your marketing strategy, it’s time to start building your Facebook presence.

This is an excerpt from “The Marketer’s Guide to Facebook.”

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