The social media team at Metro have shared their journey on Reddit and tips on how publishers can succeed on the platform.
Reddit is the fastest-growing major social media platform in the UK but often gets left out of discussions by news publishers.
Reddit works radically differently from other social media platforms and is a series of forums, or bulletin boards, on different niche topics where users can vote up and down various text contributions, pictures, videos and links.
Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), Linkedin and Tiktok are all part of the furniture now. But experiments with Reddit are largely a newer addition to the roster, especially among UK news organisations (compared to the US).
Now is a good time to be embracing Reddit: Ofcom research found it experienced growth in reach among UK adults of 58% between May 2023 (15.6 million people) and June 2024 (24.6 million). Reddit had a UK audience of 29.4 million people in December according to Ipsos iris, above Tiktok owner Bytedance (28.6 million) and X (formerly Twitter) on 21.8 million.
This growth may be partly because Reddit has seen notable growth in its Google search visibility in the past year following a deal between the two platforms.
Reddit was ‘obvious choice’ to expand Metro’s presence
DMG Media’s Metro began posting on Reddit in January last year – although its engagement really took off after it changed strategy in June.
Metro’s Reddit account has surpassed 100 million post views and 167,000 “post karma” – a Reddit score that is a reflection of the quality of a user’s content on the platform based on their upvotes and downvotes.
Kate Rice, Metro senior social media journalist, told Press Gazette Reddit had seemed like an “obvious choice” to expand onto “because it’s become such a fast-growing platform”.
She added: “I think it’s very important to build trust in journalism again, and we think that Reddit is a great opportunity to interact a bit more with a community and have a bit more of a voice as a brand.”
Initially, the strategy was simple: drop links into relevant subreddits (specific forum-style pages on Reddit dedicated to certain topics) and hope for referral traffic back to the website.
But since June, Rice and Metro audience growth editor Anushka Suharu shifted towards posting “higher quality content” and different formats like text and picture posts – not always linking back to the website but rather seeking a conversation, including in the comment section.
Suharu said: “It’s really sort of an expert audience on Reddit. They want to know the deeper dives. They already know more than we do anytime we’re posting an article on a particular subreddit, because obviously they’ve joined that community.”
They also moved away from huge subreddits that other news organisations were more likely to be posting in – r/uknews for example which has 140,000 followers – towards niche pages that fit with the topics Metro does best where they think they can “create a meaningful interaction”. For example, they are particularly active in gaming and entertainment (including soaps) communities.
Rice said: “To begin with, it felt like we wanted to sort of match where maybe competitors might be posting, or where it seemed popular to post and easy to post… that’s probably what didn’t really suit us as a brand and it didn’t resonate with our audience very much. But when we switched… we can suit our strengths a bit more.”
This fits into the strategy Metro editor-in-chief Deborah Arthurs told Press Gazette about last month. She said: “2025 will be about harnessing the power of the brand,” adding that this means “deepening our relationship with the reader, working on engagement and intentionality…” The main Metro brand itself also began to shift towards ” deeper dives, longer takes and more explanatory content” in June according to Suharu.
Free daily Metro has a print circulation of just under one million copies per day and is the 16th most popular news website in the UK with 86 million audience minutes per month, according to Ipsos iris.
Metro learns to be a ‘chameleon’ when posting on Reddit
The change worked: Suharu said Metro had less than 10 million post views on Reddit between January and June. In the second half of the year, it was over 90 million.
She said they have learned that it has to be “a longer-term strategy, rather than just dropping a few links on Reddit for a few traffic gains and then not going back to it”.
It has been “trial and error”, however. Rice said: “I think it’s something that we’ve had to learn the hard way: not every post or every comment is going to go the way you want it to. You’re probably going to get removed and banned [from subreddits].”
She recalled how they used to like posting in the major r/unitedkingdom subreddit, which has 4.5 million members, getting “really good interaction, really good traffic”.
But then users of the subreddit began complaining to its moderators. “It wasn’t just us, I think it was just that news organisations had clocked that this was a good subreddit to go to,” Rice said. “The moderators were just like, look, we don’t hate you but the users didn’t like it, so they stopped allowing media organisations in there, which was a big setback, because it was really useful.”
She added: “So we’ve learned the lesson to not rely on a subreddit and just we need to make sure that we can just be a bit of a chameleon and adjust ourselves rather than adjust the subreddit for us.”
Unlike other social media platforms, having a good relationship with the users and moderators of a subreddit is more important than speaking to internal staff at the platform itself. Moderators on the platform are volunteers who help to enforce community rules, which differ by subreddit rather than being enforced by Reddit.
For example, r/unitedkingdom, similar to some other communities, says: “Posts must use the headline from the source article. Any posts with editorialised headlines will be removed. If the headline changes or title metadata is incorrect then the moderation team will use its discretion to allow or remove the post or flair it appropriately.”
Suharu said: “It really depends on you creating your relationship with the users, and if the audience is liking what you’re writing, the moderators will like you. If you’re posting the wrong stuff and the moderators don’t like you it doesn’t matter [if the head of Reddit likes you].”
Niches and AMAs
Tactics that have worked include finding particularly niche subreddits to post in that are likely to have the perfect audience for a particular story.
For example, Metro always produces a series of articles about Pride Month in June and Rice posted about them in r/Rainbow (14,000 members) and r/Pride_and_Positivity (7,000 members).
She said: “It didn’t get as many clicks as us going to these larger subs, but the interaction we got was more meaningful, and it built our account up and our performance analytics grew a more consistent rate when we did that that month. And that a great starting point for us.”
Suharu added that the important thing is to be authentic: “With Pride, if I’m posting and I’m not part of the LGBTQ+ community, it can seem really inauthentic just to be like ‘oh, we have an article on this. Read it’ when you’re trying to post in an LGBTQ+ community. So what we try to do is say ‘hi, I’m Anushka. My colleague’s written this really great article. Here’s a little bit about the article’.”
She added that this “ended up getting loads of really positive comments. People saying ‘oh, I feel seen’. So not only was it harbouring a good environment on Reddit, but also that meant people then wanted to read our content and came back to our site, and then obviously it helped with our traffic.”
Rice also cited a Metro interview with a former Power Ranger actor about to do his first Edinburgh Fringe show, saying she found a “fairly small but pretty active” Power Rangers subreddit to post it in.
She noticed that the subreddit was mainly made up of text posts rather than links, so posted in her own voice about the interview giving most of it away but sharing the link regardless. “We got some of the nicest comments I think we’ve ever got on Reddit,” Rice said. “People were very much like ‘thanks so much for sharing. This is so insightful’.”
Metro has also run several of their own Reddit AMAs (Ask Me Anything), with the platform’s team helping to organise them. For AMAs, a user posts that they will answer questions about a certain subject at a particular date and time so people can be aware it is happening and prepare what they want to ask.
Metro’s AMAs have included gaming editor David Jenkins answering questions about the Gaming Awards in r/Gaming, senior TV reporter Josie Copson speaking about the National TV Awards in r/ukpopculture, and first-person and opinion editor Jess Austin talking about being estranged from family at Christmas from her own experiences and the brand’s Degrees of Separation series in r/EstrangedAdultChild and previously about Metro’s violence against women campaign in r/Feminism.
Suharu said: “We’ve seen that this does really well on other platforms like Instagram and Tiktok as well. People want to know about the story from our journalists, and we also want to highlight our journalists’ expertise.”
Overall, Rice said US publishers appear to be ahead of the curve compared to UK news organisations with posting on Reddit.
“I think a lot of big publications are starting to notice how strong a platform it can be for journalism and are starting to try some new things. Some have really great and well thought out strategies and I think some are more new to it.
“I think you can really notice it in some news-related subreddits where news organisations are really, really present in them, to the point where we like to post in them, but realise that there are so many other news organisations that maybe we don’t want to add to that noise, because users don’t respond well to it being taken over by publications.
“We’re pleased with the growth that we’ve had, and it’s been a really formative year, but we still don’t know everything there is to know about journalism on Reddit.”
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