Regularly ranked above the likes of CNN, the BBC and the Huffington Post, Reddit is the most influential website many people have never heard of. Billing itself as "the front page of the internet", the social sharing site is a platform where you can share interesting links and discussions about any topic under the sun. Users, known as redditors, submit links, start conversations and post comments, all of which are upvoted or downvoted by others. More upvotes mean better prominence on the site and more "karma" for the person who made the submission.

This simple, powerful system has turned Reddit into one of the web's most popular and influential places. Sometimes viewed as one big community, Reddit is made up of a series of smaller, specific-interest communities, called subreddits.

By default, the front page draws posts from popular subreddits such as /r/funny and /r/worldnews. Registering an account gives you voting rights and lets you customise your front page with your interests – whether that's /r/Ukulele (for fans of the tiny instrument) or /r/PerfectFit (objects unexpectedly fitting into others).

The "front page of the internet" moniker is quite apt: those links you see shared on Facebook and Twitter of cats that resemble dictators, world-changing scientific studies and weird news stories almost certainly went viral on Reddit first. With a highly-engaged community of influential sharers behind it, anything popular on Reddit soon becomes popular across the web, and sometimes beyond.

Given its influence and responsiveness to things that are out-of-the-ordinary, it's surprising that Reddit isn't on the radar for most cultural organisations. But how can our sector add to Reddit and what can we get out of it?

Getting started

Getting started with Reddit, as with any social network, is about creating an account and immersing yourself in the site for a while. Find your interests, learn the unwritten rules and get a feel for what works. Reddit is notoriously hostile to marketers who jump straight in; a whole subreddit, /r/HailCorporate, is dedicated to calling out ham-fisted attempts at self-promotion. And those posts are the lucky ones – make an obvious attempt to push your product at redditors, and you'll find yourself downvoted into oblivion.

As creative cultural organisations, we have content that is genuinely exciting and shareable – we shouldn't need to resort to the corporate shilling. Deciding what to post should come naturally. If people won't be excited to discover your post, it's not worth creating. Rather than linking to your new exhibition or show, consider what would stimulate real interest. Is there something amazing in your exhibition that nobody has seen before; a video so fantastic that it just begs to be watched? Then it's time to share.

Self-promotion

First, a word of warning: self-promotion extends to individual blogs and articles as well, not just those with a product to push. Reddit's personal entry on self-promotion is well worth a look. The first line is a mantra to share by: "It's perfectly fine to be a redditor with a website, it's not okay to be a website with a reddit account." The key here is that you have to be a legitimate and active member of the community, because that's exactly what it is, not a platform for self-promotion. Do submit from a variety of sources and post into relevant subreddits; don't post only your links and beg for others to upvote them.

Sharing content yourself is as straightforward as creating a link to an image, video or webpage, coming up with an intriguing title, and posting it in the right subreddit. Make content appeal to a wide audience and it will get shared widely, particularly if it can be legitimately posted in one of the larger subreddits. In fact, if something is interesting enough, another user may have already shared it. You can check what links back to your content by visiting http://reddit.com/domain/ – suffixing the URL with your own domain name, eg http://reddit.com/domain/britishmuseum.org.

What are the results like?

If your post gets a positive response, expect high traffic but low long-term engagement. You might gain lots of click-throughs, but research has shown that traffic from Reddit has the highest bounce rate of any social network. A redditor's loyalty is to Reddit, not to your site, and the majority of redditors will leave after viewing only the thing they came to see.

What else?

Another option is to venture into /r/IAmA ("I am a …") – it's a subreddit that lets anyone put themselves forward for an "AMA" (ask me anything) to answer questions from the community. Topics are presented in the following format: "IamA stage manager at a large theatre, AMA" or "AMAA" (ask me almost anything). Given the right participant, the IAmA subreddit can be more forgiving about self-promotion, if you're prepared to give honest answers.

Someone who is willing to discuss an unusual job, interesting discovery or controversial topic on your behalf can create a powerful means of spreading the word about your museum or organisation's work, and create real engagement. A recent AMA featured Sir David Attenborough, who was promoting a film made in partnership with the Natural History Museum, yet his willingness to answer questions made it a spectacular success. On the other hand, an AMA with Woody Harrelson went famously wrong when he only wanted to discuss his new film. Tellingly, one user commented: "Reddit isn't a good venue to pitch your movie, it's a venue to pitch yourself."

That sums up Reddit: not a place for promoting products, rather one for sharing what you have that will enrich other people's experience. As a sector, we produce this sort of thing by the bucketload, so perhaps it's time we shared more of what we create with this influential corner of the web.

Taras Young is digital content manager at the Arts Marketing Association and works on CultureHive – follow him on Twitter @tarasyoung

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