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Last week, we talked about showing up on Reddit as a brand. This week, we're talking about something you can do before you ever post a single comment:

Social listening!

...which might be the most underrated benefit of Reddit marketing.

Reddit is one of the last places on the internet where people say what they actually think, in their actual words, without the fear of their boss or their LinkedIn network seeing it. That's incredibly valuable. And most brands are completely ignoring it.

Let's fix that, shall we?👇

🗣️ Let me be clear: social listening on Reddit is not the same as monitoring your brand mentions and calling it a day.

That's part of it. But if that's all you're doing, you're leaving most of the value on the table.

Real Reddit social listening means using the platform as a continuous research feed for:

It's market research, voice-of-the-customer, and competitive intelligence. And it's 100% free, if you know where to look.

Before you can listen, you need to know where to listen.

This sounds obvious, but I've seen brands start "Reddit listening programs" while monitoring completely the wrong subreddits. They're watching r/marketing when their audience is in r/smallbusiness. They're in r/entrepreneurship when their buyers are in r/personalfinance.

So here's how to find the right rooms:

Search the problem, not the product. Start with the pain points your product solves. If you sell project management software, search "remote team communication" or "async work frustration" before you search your brand name. The subreddits where those conversations are happening? That's your audience.

Look at where questions get real answers. Not all subreddits are equally active. You want communities where people ask questions and actually get helpful responses: multi-comment threads, votes on replies, and genuine back and forth conversation. A subreddit with 200k members but recent posts from 2022 is not useful to you.

Don't overlook niche subreddits. The smaller, more specific communities are often where you'll find the most honest and detailed conversations. r/freelancedesigners is going to give you more unfiltered ICP truth than r/design ever will.

Make a list of 5-10 subreddits to monitor consistently. Quality over quantity here.

Once you know where to look, you need to know what you're looking for. Here are the four categories I'd prioritize:

The exact words people use when they're frustrated with a problem your product solves. Not "I find the workflow inefficient", REAL language like "I spent three hours trying to get my team to actually use this thing and I wanted to throw my laptop out a window."

That language is copy 🤌 That language is your ad creative 🤌 That language is the subject line of your next email that gets a 40% open rate because it sounds exactly like something your customer would say 🤌

When you find it, write it down. Verbatim. Keep a swipe file.

Search your competitors' names in the subreddits you're monitoring. Read the threads—not just the top-level posts, but the comment sections. That's where the real opinions live.

What do people love about them? What frustrates them? What made someone switch away? What do they wish was different?

This is competitive intelligence that no analyst report will give you, and it's sitting there, publicly, for free.

Look for posts that start with "I'm trying to decide between X and Y" or "Is [tool] actually worth it?" These are buyers at the edge of a purchase decision, and the thread that follows is essentially a live focus group.

What factors are they weighing? What objections come up repeatedly? What does the community tell them matters most? This should directly inform your positioning and sales enablement content.

Everyone uses social listening to find complaints. Fewer people use it to find the things customers love and the specific way they describe that love.

When someone says "honestly this is the one tool I'd never give up," that's a testimonial framing waiting to happen. When a thread of 200 upvotes validates a specific use case for a product like yours, that's a signal about what to lead with in your messaging.

Don't just mine Reddit for pain. Mine it for what's working too.

You don't need an expensive enterprise social listening platform to do this well. Here's the honest toolkit:

Reddit's native search: Criminally underused. Search your keywords, then filter by "Top" and "Past Year." You'll surface the most validated conversations without any extra tools.

Reddit Pro: If you haven't set this up yet, do it this week. It gives you basic analytics and monitoring capabilities that are genuinely useful for tracking brand mentions. Oh, and it’s free!

Google Alerts + "site:reddit.com": Old school but effective. Set up alerts for your brand name site:reddit.com and competitor name site:reddit.com and you'll get email pings when new mentions happen.

Mention or Brand24: If you want something more automated and comprehensive, either of these tools does a solid job of Reddit monitoring without being prohibitively expensive.

A simple Google Sheet: Genuinely. A spreadsheet where you log key findings, quotes, dates, and subreddits is more useful than a fancy dashboard if you're actually reviewing it regularly.

The goal isn't to collect data. It's to read it and use it. Tools that make you feel like you're doing something but that you never actually review are not helping you.

Here's where most brands drop the ball. They do the listening, they have all these insights, and then...nothing happens with it.

So let's talk about how to actually operationalize what you're hearing.

Build a monthly Reddit insights report. It doesn't have to be long. One page, shared with marketing, product, and sales. What were people saying this month? What patterns showed up? What surprised you? This makes Reddit listening a business input, not just a marketing activity.

Feed it into your content calendar. If you see the same question come up three times in a subreddit this month, that's a content brief or a video idea. Reddit is showing you what people want to know, so answer it.

Share competitor intel with your sales team. If you're seeing a pattern of frustration around a competitor, your sales team needs to know. Not to trash-talk, but to be prepared to address it when it comes up in conversations.

Use the language in your copy. I'll say this again because it's that important: the exact words your customers use on Reddit should show up in your marketing. If your ads and emails sound like a corporate press release but your customers talk like real humans, there's a gap. Reddit helps you close it.

You don't need to be on Reddit every day for this to work. But you do need to be consistent.

My recommendation: block one hour per week for Reddit listening. That's it. Use it to read through your target subreddits, log anything notable, and keep your swipe file updated. One hour a week, done consistently for six months, will give you more useful customer insight than most brands get from a full year of formal research.

Set a recurring calendar block. Actually do it. Don't let it become the thing you mean to do but somehow never get to.

Next week is gonna be a good one. We're going into Reddit for community-building, which, to me, is the true foundation of all your Reddit marketing efforts.

Hope to see you there 🫶

Talk soon,

KD