Promoting a crowdfunding campaign on reddit can be a major driver of traffic and funding. Campaign managers have quickly caught on to the power of reddit, evidenced by the 100’s of kickstarter links being shared on reddit each week.
Anyone with an active crowdfunding campaign should strongly consider engaging the reddit platform. A successful post on reddit could literally mean thousands of extra dollars coming into your campaign. But you need to be cautious about how you share your campaign. Sharing your campaign could be viewed as spam if you do not do it the right way.
This post will walk you through the opportunities on reddit for promoting a crowdfunding campaign and help you avoid the common mistakes that are made. Additionally, incorporating a well-crafted contest or giveaway using a competition template can significantly enhance your campaign’s visibility, engage the Reddit community, and amplify your chances of success.
Are redditors talking about your campaign?
Before you show up to talk about yourself on reddit, you should find out if redditors are already talking about you. Hopefully, redditors will have already heard about your campaign and have shared it in various reddit communities. To find out if this has happened, do a reddit search for the URL of your campaign and the title of your campaign.
To search for the title of your campaign, simply go to reddit.com/search and enter the title. Try common variations on the title as well in case a redditor shared your campaign without using the full title. Go through the results carefully to find any mentions of your campaign.
To search for the URL of your campaign, use the “url:” search parameter to perform a URL search:
This will find any reddit submissions that link to the URL of your campaign. Note that Kickstarter likes to append various referral parameters to their URLs based on how a user lands on your campaign, so there are many different variations of your campaign URL that could be shared on reddit. Therefore, your campaign URL may have been shared on reddit, but a URL search might not reveal the submission.
If you do find a mention of your campaign on reddit, take the time to read the submission and any comments. If people are asking questions that you can answer, jump into the conversation. If people are saying nice things about you, say hi and thank them. If people are criticizing the campaign, try to be helpful in your responses and do not engage in unproductive arguments. Remember that you are representing your brand and whatever you say will live on reddit for all to see (unless you cop-out and delete your comment).
Engage the crowdfunding communities
The crowdfunding communities on reddit are the low-hanging fruit. If you take the time to read each communities’ rules and create a thoughtful post, you can share your campaign without spamming. Below are the various crowdfunding communities that accept campaign submissions (and one that does not, but you should know about it).
FIRST, a few words of caution before you submit your campaign on reddit. Every community on reddit has its own set of rules and subculture. Some communities are more tolerant of promotion than others, so be sure to look for the rules in the sidebar of the subreddit and use the “site:” search parameter to see if links to kickstarter or indiegogo campaigns have been shared. The “site:” search parameter will show you all of the submissions that link to a specific domain (e.g. kickstarter.com).
If you find links to crowdfunding projects, read the title of each post and see what the community members are saying in the comments section.
With that said, here is a list of crowdfunding subreddits you should check out.
- /r/Kickstarter – This is the largest community on reddit for crowdfunding projects. It started out as a community for sharing Kickstarter projects, but has evolved and accepts posts for crowdfunding projects on any platform. You can submit your campaign to /r/Kickstarter, but read the submitting guidelines first.
- /r/CrowdfundingProjects – This is a small community on reddit that is specifically for submitting crowdfunding projects. We suggest using a text post to give information about your project and who is behind it.
- /r/Crowdfundedgames – Community to submit a video game campaign.
- /r/CrowdfundedBoardgames – Community to submit a board game campaign.
- /r/Crowdfunding – This is not a place to submit your campaign, but instead a community of people that are interested in crowdfunding in general. This is a great community for crowdfunding news and campaign management resources.
Find your crowd on reddit
If your crowdfunding campaign solves a problem for a particular community, find that community on reddit and share it with them. Finding subreddits dedicated to a specific interest can be difficult, so we wrote a post that will help you do just that: How to find subreddits related to your niche.
Read that post if you need help and again – take the time to learn about the subreddit and their rules before submitting a post. We highly recommend sharing your campaign as a text post in these subreddits. Give redditors as much information as possible before asking them to go to your campaign page.
Try a reddit AMA
An AMA is a great way to connect with a targeted audience, answer their questions about your crowdfunding campaign, and promote your campaign. Like everything else on reddit, it is not as simple as logging on and sharing your campaign link. Luckily, we have written a comprehensive guide that we strongly encourage you to read before doing an AMA.
Get our guide to reddit AMAs here
One of the big decisions you will need to make is choosing a subreddit for your AMA. You have two basic options:
1. Find a subreddit related to your niche
We mentioned before how to find your crowd on reddit. Once you do, check to see if there are any specific rules in the sidebar about AMAs and if anyone else has done an AMA before in that subreddit. Perform the following search to find previous AMAs:
If you decide to hold your AMA in a niche subreddit, be sure to message the moderators before making too many plans. Introduce yourself to the moderators and be honest about who you are and what you are promoting. The purpose of this message is to get a feel for what the moderators think of your AMA and to make sure they will not remove it for breaking a rule or for being overly promotional.
2. /r/IAmA
If you have a great story and have a list of impressive accomplishments, you should consider holding your AMA in the main AMA subreddit – /r/IAmA. This subreddit has over 8 million subscribers and can be a huge promotional opportunity.
The catch is that you must have already done something not related to your crowdfunding campaign that is “AMA worthy”. Your AMA must focus on your expertise, an extraordinary experience, or your notoriety. If your AMA is too focused on your crowdfunding campaign or you simply do not have an interesting enough story, the moderators will remove it.
Read all of the rules for the /r/IAmA subreddit here.
Are you new to Reddit?
There are numerous opportunities to promote a crowdfunding campaign on reddit, but you must take the time to learn about the platform, rules, and communities you plan to engage. If you are new to Reddit, start here.
