How to start and grow a subreddit for B2B SaaS?
And why. Based on my experience of growing 4 subreddits.
There are 3 ways to get impressions and clicks for your B2B brand on Reddit:
Taking part in comments under relevant threads;
Publishing your own posts in other subreddits;
Running your own subreddit.
Your own subreddit is the place where you have the biggest leverage to influence. Some type of content you want to publish will never be accepted by moderators of other subreddits (if you don’t ask to pay them for it).
However, running your own subreddit is also the hardest thing. You have to invest months of work to see first traction. After running 4 subreddits, I see that:
Really, not every brand needs it. It’s a long-term game for brands that have something to say and want one more big channel to spread the message.
The number one step to success is the right expectations. You have to admit that it will take a long time.
Despite all of that, Reddit gives much more organic reach for subreddits than LinkedIn or X(Twitter) to company pages.
Get help with Reddit SEO services for B2B SaaS at my B2B Gaps agency
2 reasons to run your subreddit
1/ Rank your content in Google SERP and influence LLMs
This is the main long-term goal. You want to build an active community that allows you to win in SERPs & LLMs by highly competitive keywords.
We play by Google’s rules, and Google loves Reddit. I see more and more that content published on Reddit ranks better than the same content published on authoritative websites.
Below is an example of what we’ve achieved at /r/Sitechecker subreddit for 3 months. All of that without building backlinks.
2/ Attract new audience from Reddit itself
This is the most non-obvious thing for SEOs who think only about traffic from Google and LLMs. Reddit is both a huge social media and search engine. It has an advanced recommendation algorithm that helps you distribute your content to your ICP.
Don’t be afraid that creating your own community will be considered spam. The Reddit team promotes this option for brands. Check this video from Imogen Maric, and you’ll see how the Reddit team thinks about it.
How to send visitors from a sub to your website
Your own subreddit helps to influence people’s decisions, even if you don’t get conversions immediately.
People will learn about your brand from Reddit, Google, and LLMs when they read your content → all of that will lead to an increase in brand searches and sales later.
However, you also have 3 methods to send them directly to your site.
1/ Links in posts and comments
This is the most obvious. You can add links to your site without fear that somebody will delete your post because it’s a promotion.
However, I believe that you have to add links only when they’re really valuable for a user. I don’t publish posts to build links; I publish posts to share news, own the narrative, and share some details about what the brand can do, and add links only as a part of content.
2/ Welcome page for joined members
You can add a pop-up that each user who joins the community will see. This is one more place to paste the most important links and resources.
3/) Community bookmarks
This is a list of links that are built inside the right sidebar and are constantly visible to users when they read posts.
Remember, your power as a moderator is limited
Yes, running your own community is the biggest leverage on Reddit, but it’s still not the same power you have on other social media.
The most important thing → you don’t own a subreddit as you own a company page on LinkedIn, Facebook, X, or YouTube. Think of yourself as a tenant, not an owner.
You can’t delete a subreddit.
You can’t redirect it.
You can’t change its name.
It can be banned for unmoderation or a lot of self-promotion.
It can even be transferred from you to others after a long period of inactivity.
The last one is the most unexpected thing, and that’s why it’s so important to invite your colleagues or friends as moderators too.
Launching a new subreddit is only 1 of 3 options
Because nobody owns subreddits, it also creates opportunities.
1/ You can buy a subreddit
Important! Buying a community is against the Moderator Code of Conduct. You won’t find an official marketplace or site to buy a Reddit community.
However, it’s almost impossible to track such deals for Reddit, because all operations (negotiations, sending money) are handled outside the platform. Most of the deals are made via the following model:
You negotiate the conditions of the deal with a top moderator of the community
The top moderator invites you to become a moderator
The top moderator is exiting from a moderator position
You automatically become the moderator of the community
The other way is that the top mod invites you as a mod and you manage the community, in fact, even without deleting old moderators.
2/ You can request to work on some old, unmoderated subreddit
It’s like a drop domains in SEO :) People die, forget about the subreddits they managed, lose motivation to continue working with them, etc.
That’s why Reddit created a separate sub where you can ask to become a moderator of an old, unmoderated community → https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/
Here is the list of criteria for submitting a successful request on r/redditrequest.
How to name your community (brand vs category)
It’s a hard question for many, because you can’t change it later. The answer depends on 2 variables:
How popular your brand is.
What are your main goals with a community?
I recommend creating a brand community:
If the brand already has a lot of fans, people look for specific products and questions related to the brand.
The company plans not just to get traffic to a website from a sub but also to build one more direct channel of communication with customers (share product updates, run surveys, reply to product issues, etc).
In other cases, the niche community with a category name is better, because nobody cares about your brand yet, people just look for unbiased reviews, tips, and feedback.
2 types of content you need to grow a subreddit
1/Really interesting content people can't read in other subreddits.
It includes:
strong opinions, thought leader posts;
being the first to post news;
describe real painful questions so accurately that your audience can't;
real user experience with screenshots.
The goal of this content type is to get better CTRs in the home feed and attract real members who will take part in discussions.
The problem is that many SEOs can't do it. You have to think and act as a marketer or magazine owner.
2/ Long articles with images focused on targeting specific keywords.
It's much easier. You do what you've done years before publishing SEO content on your websites. However, think about these articles as real landing pages where you sell your product.
Because it's not enough to rank in SERP. Your goal is to influence people's minds about which use cases your product wins and why.
Having 2 types of content, you build a machine that constantly acquires new traffic from both Reddit and Google.
5 ways to speed up your subreddit growth
Send traffic to it from your website, email list, and other social media.
Repurpose content from other platforms and publish it in a subreddit.
Crosspost your best-performing posts to other communities.
Publish 2-4 hot topics in a subreddit each month (data studies, interviews/AMAs, unique how-to guides, etc).
Incentivize your team and customers to take part in discussions.
How to measure your subreddit growth?
With the rise of AI, Reddit is full of bots and people who leave AI-generated comments. Recently, their CEO published an announcement on how they plan to work with it.
These changes also affect how you measure how your community is growing. The number of posts and comments is no longer as important, because 100% of them can be from bots.
I believe that only those communities that can attract real people to join and participate in discussions will thrive. That’s why this is my hierarchy of the most important milestones you have to track:
The first organic comment from a human.
The first organic post from a human.
The first viral posts (1k, 5k, 10k impressions)
100-500-1000 members joined.
The first traffic from Reddit.
The first posts ranked at the top of Google.
The first demos and sales mentioned Reddit as a source during signup.
Here are the stats of 4 B2B communities, where I’m a moderator. You can check how long it is active, how many views it has had, and the members it acquired.
As you see, it’s really hard. Even /r/favikon/, after 8 months of active work, hasn’t achieved it yet. However, I believe it is possible to achieve this milestone in 6-12 months for most B2B SaaS.
Remember that Ahrefs doesn’t see all the rankings of your subreddit. You’ll get much more traffic from search and AI chats than you can measure.
Also, good news, that after 6 months, Reddit finally gave up, deleted the noreferrer attribute for external links & gave us back the ability to measure traffic from Reddit in GA4.
That’s it. I didn’t cover a lot of small, important details about spam moderation, designing the sub, using flairs, and so on, but you can find a lot of these things on the separate resource → https://redditforcommunity.com/.
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