Having just come off the tails open interview with a fellow Indiehacker on how to use Reddit for marketing, I wondered to myself what were the best tools out there to actually accomplish this type of strategy?
I had a look through Google, Reddit, and a couple of app review websites themselves and noticed there wasn’t a lot of material out there.
It’s been about three hours this morning looking through these so here are my results.
📑 Best Reddit marketing tool overall: GummySearch. The key to Reddit marketing seems to be in commenting rather than posting. GummySearch does the best job of this by allowing you to search keywords specifically within subreddits that you target, and then quickly navigate to those related posts so that you can comment quickly.
🗓️ The best for post-scheduling: SocialRise. If you really do want to post a lot read it, then SocialRise looks to be the best option. There are different from the other tools in that they allow you to post in multiple subreddits at the same time and they have the advanced functionality of being able to add the correct flair to your post.
⌨️ The best tool for Analysis: SocialRise. Right now, SocialRise seems to have the very best analytics on posting performance and on the activity within subreddits themselves. You can track how all your posts have done in terms of awareness and clicks etc, and you can look at what keyword combinations are popular within a certain subreddit.
To find out how I came to these conclusions and how these tools work individually, read on below for my full analysis.
What do we need?
Before doing any kind of evaluation it makes sense to ask, what do we really need from a Reddit marketing tool?
Given I’ve just done an interview about this, it seems to me that there are three main strategies to Reddit marketing:
- Follow up DMs
- Commenting (primary)
- Posting
For follow-up DMs, you probably need to be looking at certain topics and keywords for relevant discussion so that you can message the person. So keyword tracking is going to be essential here.
For commenting, it’s going to require the same thing. We need to know what people are talking about at a very high level, so we can sweep it and add comments related to helping that person and also gently plug a link here in there.
Posting was all about non-promotional posts. You can’t just plug your product in most subreddits. You need to be able to tell a story, so it’s probably not that important of a feature to be able to schedule posts unless you want to be engaging in some questionable tactics.
Inbox management
Starting with follow-up DMS, it would make sense that you should have some kind of inbox manager within the tool so you don’t have to jump back and forth between Reddit.
Having said that I kind of think that the Reddit inbox manager itself is sufficient.
None of the tools I profiled had inbox managers however, SocialRise did have an autoresponder tool that is related.
I am mentioning this here because if you’re reading this you’re probably curious to know.
But I don’t think it’s a good tool because it sounds like you’re gonna engage in really spammy behavior that read it takes overall. I can’t see it also being very good because you probably are doing more harm than good buy order responding by DM about keywords and missing the mark with your messaging.
The way I could see it working well as if you do a ‘respond to my post with a keyword’ campaign.
That could be really cool but I honestly haven’t seen that many done well, but that might be something you already do in which case you may want to consider a SlowRise for this.
Audience discovery
Alright so for audience discovery we’re looking for something here that’s more efficient than literally just searching up communities in the Reddit search bar.
We’re looking for tools that allow us to use keywords to find all the relevant communities and filter them down.
All tools except Cronnit had some related features for this use case.
Later for Reddit had an interesting one in that you could search one subreddit, and then it would make suggestions below for related communities. It helped with the filtering by listing how active those communities were. I would have appreciated a little tooltip he had to understand the green Wi-Fi signal thing, but I’m guessing it means the activity level.
Delay for Reddit, which I find has an interesting name given Later for Reddit, had a keyword searching tool that would show the subreddits that have that keyword in it.
As you can see this is kind of a ‘bull in a China shop’ type approach because the communities are not necessarily related thematically to the keyword you’re using.
One cool thing was that it showed you whether or not those subreddits accepted links. So that was nice.
GummySearch had the best audience profiling tool that I found.
You use their “audience creator” tool, you type in your keyword, and it shows you a whole bunch of communities that are recommended for inclusion in that audience.
You can then narrow down which communities you want to keep in that audience so that you can keep tabs on that audience overall as a group, rather than individual subreddits.
Social Rise had an interesting function where you could analyze the performance activity of a particular subreddit. Then it also had a section with related subreddits by keywords and users.
I don’t know that the related subreddits by keywords were that useful because they didn’t seem to be very accurate.
But you can see that SocialRise’s ‘related subreddits by users’ would be very interesting. If you’re targeting a very niche audience, and you see all the other stuff they are into, that could be useful intel for your marketing.
Keyword listening
Only GummySearch amongst the five had a dedicated keyword listening tool.
If you’re listening out for conversations, it makes sense that you want to plug in all your keywords in one place, and then see where they pop up in your audience rather than click into every subreddit and scan it every day.
What I like about this particular feature is set up like an inbox.
It’s suitable for logging in every day, reviewing all the keywords that you’re tracking, and clicking the results to see what conversations are going on using those keywords in your targeted audience is.
This is way better than having a keyword search in Reddit generally or trying to search in subreddits one by one.
Post scheduling
Post scheduling is probably the main feature that people are looking at when they think about Reddit marketing tools. A lot of the narrative about how to do Reddit marketing seems to be led by the initial tweet and social media schedulers like Hootsuite and Buffer.
I just want to note here that it seems like posting overall is a really poor strategy to be trying to do on a large scale.
It seems that strategy is way more about writing stories that are personal and tangentially related to your product.
In any case, Cronnit was the first tool I came across when Googling around for a scheduler.
What’s nice about it is that it’s free and it’s made by an independent developer. The whole tool is donation supported.
As you can see from the screenshots, making a post is pretty easy.
You just log in click the blue out of post button and then add which subreddit title body etc you need for the post.
One thing I noticed here is that it’s missing the ability to add flair to your posts which is required often by subreddits. You can see below as an example, /r/socialmedia requires flair for all posts.
It was interesting to note when I was looking at people’s feedback on the tool is that they suggested you can use IFTTT to do it for free.
If you’re a real hacker and don’t want to use any other tools then IFTTT, this is how you do it below but it looks way too complicated to me.
I didn’t even bother trying to do this for the sake of my analysis but you’re welcome to try it yourself.
The next tool I found, was called Delay for Reddit. I’m not sure what the background story is here between Delay and Later for Reddit, but those guys should really work out the name for their tools.
As you can see in the screenshot above you can add a lot more capabilities here by posting from different accounts, adding link flair and a time for the post to be deleted from Reddit itself.
The cross-posting functionality is there as well.
I’m not sure why people want to be removing their posts from Reddit, but that seems like a strange feature to me.
Next up was Later for Reddit. It was very similar to Delay for Reddit, but it seemed like it had some extra functions around posting it right away and within a certain time frame.
It had the same capabilities of adding flair or doing text, link, or image post. As far as I could see, you can’t delete the post a certain time like you can with Delay.
Finally, SocialRise had the best of all the post scheduler features. You can see it offers all the different types of content such as text, images, and links, and it also gave you the ability to post to multiple subreddits at the same time.
For the flair, it also allows you to pick the flair per subreddit, which looked like a fairly advanced feature in comparison.
Activity Tracking
For me, it made sense to have some kind of feature around looking at what posts perform or when you should post yourself.
Delay for Reddit had an interesting one where you could put in a subreddit name and it will analyze the best times to post for you. You can see what it looks like below.
Later for Reddit had a stronger feature around this. You can see that they even suggested key times.
One really interesting feature with the Later for Reddit was that they profiled the top performing post names with keyword combinations in 3 or 4 word combinations.
I think this is really interesting from a content marketing POV because you can see what some high-performing topic titles are.
Just for this feature alone, I’m probably gonna come back to Later for Reddit to do some headline research now and then.
SocialRise had the most robust activity profiler here. It was a little buggy in that I couldn’t get some of the biggest subreddits to work, like /r/contentmarketing, but maybe that was just my poor luck.
You can see they offered a week view and summary of the best times to post.
What was awesome as well is that they offered some really interesting data around related subreddits, which I described before, but also the most influential users by upvotes.
If you want to discover and find influencers on Reddit, you can use SocialRise to analyze the subreddit and find the most upvoted users by posts or comments.
GummySearch had some general audience tracking here . They looked at the combination of your subreddits to see their overall size, how many were online and whether the group was growing or not by week.
Review Scores
Having profiled five tools in the space here, I wanted to go through and see what the reviews were for each of them. What do people say about them, were they trustworthy or did anyone have any problems with getting their accounts locked up etc?
GummySearch Review
GummySearch seems to have the most reviews on Trustpilot, and the vast majority of all positive. I use this one myself and I recommend it because it is the most suitable for Reddit marketing via comments and has the most polished experience.
Social Rise Review
Sadly it seems that the Trustpilot page for SocialRise is related to a completely different business. I couldn’t find a similar app review page to review them.
Having said that, I couldn’t find a lot of negative comments on their Reddit. It seems that most people must be somewhat happy with the tool and they are actually engaging with the comments as you can see below.
Later for Reddit Review
Similarly, I couldn’t find any Trustpilot or other review website talking about Later for Reddit. But I could see at least they were engaging with people who comment about their solution on related subreddits.
I didn’t find any alarming comments saying it was a suspicious tool or anything like that.
Delay for Reddit Review
Sadly, Delay for Reddit had the lowest reviews. It only has two reviews on Trustpilot, and it seems both of them are quite negative.
You can see the reply from the app founder is not encouraging but you never know what the full story is here.
Having said that, I think if you’re an indie product founder you can take a lot of the comments quite personally, so I can understand if things get a little emotional.
Cronnit Review
I couldn’t find any reviews related to Cronnit anywhere, but I could see at least people enjoy the tool with posts like this below.
How much do they cost?
Overall, I think SocialRise is probably the best value for money if you wanna do posting.
- Delay for Reddit: Free to $20+ per month
- GummySearch: $16+ per month
- Social Rise: 20 free posts, then $8+ per month
- Cronnit: Free, donation supported
- Later for Reddit: Free to $30+ per month
FAQ
I searched the app store and currently, there are no Reddit post scheduling apps in the app store.
I have added Syften to the list.
Closing Notes
I hope you found these reviews helpful, if you had any questions about my experience using any of these tools please comment below.
Adding comments to my post really helps me know whether or not I’m doing a good job and that people appreciate my work so please do jump in!
If you were looking For more information on how to properly mark it unread it then check out the interview I did on this topic here.