Reddit Flags Promotional Posts Before Anyone Sees Them
Marketers are finding traditional marketing approaches ineffective on Reddit, struggling to understand the platform's unique dynamics and optimal activity levels. They grapple with measuring ROI, avoiding spam flags, and finding tools that genuinely support authentic engagement rather than automated promotion.
SOURCES (60)
“My Reddit gains tons of new followers daily, I still get big hit posts, and see tons of conversion from it. However my twitter has been completely dead. Gained like 30 followers in 2 months. The same things that do well on Reddit get absolutely…”
“Thank you. That’s what I am trying to do right now - gather feedback and make this a place which could help people in the easiest way possible”
“i spend a lot of time answering questions in language-learning subreddits, because that's where my app's users are. last week i actually read the rules of ten of them. eight forbid self-promotion outright and a couple promise a ban for it. what several of those same rulesets also say, nearly word for word, is what you're supposed to do instead: build a track record of helpful posts and put your contact information in your profile. so in those communities the comment is your reach and”
“I've actually gained a good amount of users, its the paid users I'm bit missing mostly. My point being is that it does look to me that trying to get users from Reddit organically is a too much work for the effort needed. I can't get the ball rolling: getting one or two new paid user per month after multiple messages and conversations is not really a viable path to continue. After all, I have the app to maintain and all ;D”
“reddit = finding new people who don’t know you exist yet. discord = keeping people who already do. if you’re pre-launch you need reddit, just don’t go in guns blazing, gotta actually be normal there for a bit first or it backfires hard”
I started this in May with a very specific problem: I didn't know what to post on X. Not "how to write" - I could write. I didn't know what to post…
“That's the ugly part of it. The filter can't tell intent, only shape, and "new account, lots of comments, few followers" is the same shape whether you're spamming or genuinely trying to participate first. So the honest route trips it and buying a 5-year-old account with 40k karma sails straight through. Which is roughly the same logic as most of the fake growth posts here. The system rewards the appearance of standing, so people buy the appearance instead of earning it.”
“Just put my thing into beta and I'm trying to get to the first 100 users. Every guide gives the same three answers: post on reddit, do cold outreach, write content. All true, none of it tells me much about what actually moves the number. It's a tool for designers and frontend devs to save and organise UI reference, so the audience is at least fairly specific, which I'm hoping helps. For people who've actually gotten there, how many of your first 100 came from you personally talki”
“One thing nobody tells you: a fresh account posting a link gets auto-filtered on a lot of subs regardless of how good the post is, karma/trust has to come first. The actual sequence that works is backwards from what feels natural: spend a week just giving real, useful answers on threads where you'd genuinely have something to add, no link, no mention of your thing, then post once you're not a 0-karma account anymore. Cold-posting a link on day one gets you filtered even in front of the e”
“100% this. No wonder there is an entire market of people selling old accounts. Its almost like there is a punishment to do it the right way but instant reward doing the wrong way.”
“Hadn't had this before, apparently mods at capcut thought that promoting my app as an alternative in comments (which should be ok by their rules, checked) is worth of 30 days mute 🤣 Is that a sign my app is doing something right? 😃 submitted by /u/Old-Age6220 [link] [comments]”
“Reddit is better for interacting with like-minded people and discord is better for building your community imo”
“I'm building a software product voor a specific online niche of business owners. I feel like Reddit was the ideal place to talk to potential customers who have a problem you can fix, but this had changed a lot over the last couple of months/years. While Discord is still pretty open to talking about your product etc. Or am I just doing it wrong? submitted by /u/Practical-Focus3455 [link] [comments]”
“Not naming the sub because I don't think the mods did it, and I'll get to why. About a month ago I posted a discussion question there. Nothing promotional, no links, just a question about signup flows. Twenty views in the first stretch, which felt slow but whatever. Then I checked the post itself and got "Sorry, this post was removed by Reddit's filters." Not the mods. Reddit. Fine, happens to new accounts. I messaged the mods and asked them to approve it. No reply, then or”
“I kind of feel drained by the amount of people who keep posting on send you link and get your traffic on X over and over again... It seems original content has slowly been going down over the past months Some have noted this in the platform itself I thought this was okay at the beginning since I have been there for a month now but that's all I see.. from top to bottom as if there's nothing else. apart from designers I follow submitted by /u/Initial_Ruin_2608 [link] [com”
“Yeah, sometimes us as founders, we are too close to the product/business and we forget, nobody knows what it is or cares so if you don’t plainly and obviously make it the solution to peoples problems, it’s just a wasted effort Also, your username is hilarious on this post”
this is actually useful, i tried similar approach but i was being too vague in my replies. just saying "dm me i have something" is lazy and nobody responds to that. the…
“Yeah, this is where I keep landing. r/Truckers runs Reddit ads on its own front page while banning organic promotion - that's the whole business model in one screenshot. What stopped me buying any today: the landing page wasn't ready for paid traffic. A driver in another thread told me it read like a data-harvesting operation, and he was right - no screenshots, no way to see the product without handing over an email. Paying for clicks into that would just have bought me a more expensive”
“i aim for 50/50 but the trick is i stopped treating content as marketing and started treating it as product every article or post is just answering a question someone already typed into a search bar or chatbot the shift was realizing i dont need to be annoying if im showing up where people are already looking distribution isnt about being loud its about being the answer to something specific”
Dont you get banned really easily for promoting on reddit?
Good job Do i get banned if i share my saas link in a reddit post?
“I hear a lot of people saying how they got their first boost from reddit, traffic and exposure and sales etc but here i am, being rejected or downvoted for self promotion (well duh), and getting my posts removed due to Reddit’s spam filters or breaking self promotion rules in literally every single subreddits. So my question is, quite simple HTF do i use reddit to promote my saas? I have a good, free to use browser editor saas that works extremely well, which i am really struggling to promote in”
“For me, you have to be careful with the i got 100 users in a week. This can happen but in most of the case at the beginning you get 10 users in a week. And this can already be a good start to get some feedback on your product by watching the sessions of your users for example”
“For me Reddit works better when I stop thinking about leads at all. I mostly watch for the same problems coming up again and again, then reply when I actually have something useful to add. Even if that person never becomes a customer, you still learn how people describe the problem and what they’re already doing about it.”
“I accidentally learned something about Reddit outreach I’m relatively new to Reddit, and I’ve been trying to understand how people actually connect with other builders here. At first, I was mostly trying to participate through posts and comments. A few of my posts were removed, which made me realize I probably didn’t understand the culture of some of these communities very well. So I started spending more time reading existing discussions instead of trying to create my own. One thing I noticed w”
“Reddit marketing is a a real thing now where you’d have bot accounts to create a history, then shill products in posts like these.”
“Call names, huh? The guy mentioned his product twice, and still no reason to call it an ad?”
“Is Reddit a good way ? Yes, there's a lot of traffic here, but you have to be able to convert this traffic into customers, which isn't easy. It's the same for all vectors of customers acquisition. But let's be realistic: SaaS that generate an ARR > $100k are the 0.3~0.5% of all the SaaS being launched. 70% fail completely, which means that roughly 30% make some money but less than $100k/year. So we're likely to see those in the 30% who make some money here, but depending o”
“Yeah nobody asked for you to step in with an advertisement. I was having a back-and-forth with someone else.”
“Not necessarily. It should sound natural. He knows that if he say "1K users" it will not be considered truth. But doing this, he still can have many eyeballs. It's called "organic" these days.”
“Easy and short. I post a spicy pic on a certain sub where I usually post for promoting, I get something like 100 upvotes in half an hour, a total of 300 in some hours (yeah it's a lot for such subs, it's a niche in the niche). I post another pic, quite similar, I get no upvotes in half an hour. Zero. What's inside Reddit algorithm, crazy hamsters? My god IG algorithm is such a pain, here even worse. I really will consider to pay somebody to promote me. kind people downvoting: explain”
“10 active users is a pretty weird thing to fake for an ad though. like if you were going to fabricate a milestone for promotion you'd probably pick a number that actually sounds impressive. the post reads more like someone excited about their first real users than a marketing play.”
“I’ll keep it sorta short and simple and to the point. I’m looking around for subs people have been successful in that don’t require verification by showing your face, but are also active and moderated. I’ve had a lot of hit or miss experience with advertising and I don’t really have it down yet… any tips? submitted by /u/FairyHoneyDew_ [link] [comments]”
“Oh, I totally didn't get that you were referring to the *other subreddit, sorry! Makes more sense now. I thought you were referring to this one. Hopefully you can see how that would lead to my misunderstanding.”
“I agree reddit marketing is a gold mine to get users, but reddit doesn't work like normal marketing channels like come buy this or buy this at 10%off or something like this, you have to interact with other people's post and post something which is worth a conversation like what's the problem or what can be the solution or why this is a actual problem not just a one you felt like I hope u r understanding what I am trying to say, and reddit brings users only when the other users see th”
“I learned this after one polished, AI-assisted comment got deleted while a scrappy answer with the exact SQL fix stayed up and pulled DMs for weeks. Reddit can smell the funnel by paragraph two.”
“Took way to long to get here. Kinda explains why reddit isn't full of millionaires”
“Three channels, one 100k view post each, and three permanent verdicts about what each platform is for. That is one observation per lane. The Reddit post converted because it was about building in public and landed on people shopping for exactly that. Sort your posts by intent for a quarter before retiring a channel.”
“Hello everyone, hope u all are doing well. I saw alot of posts of saas founders saying they get alot of users from reddit. And i always wonder how ... im not really into Reddit and how it works... do you join communities related to ur SaaS and just make posts promoting it or what. Thanks submitted by /u/InsideCondition7221 [link] [comments]”
“views are the easy part, the replicable bit is having data or a niche people already argue about. i've had posts do 100k+ and convert almost nobody, so i'd ask what the installs looked like not the views.”
“I’m currently running an experiment - how many users can I get for 100k Reddit views? - I’ve been making Reddit posts and counting the views I get from the posts - My app is about tracking goals, so I’ve been mostly posting about goals. However, I’ve also experimented by posting unrelated content. See the full list of posts below for more info - Most of my posts don’t directly link to my app. The link to my app is on my Reddit profile. Only interested people that see my post and click through to”
Honestly relate to this so much. I built an app too and the marketing anxiety hit way harder than any bug I debugged. What worked a little for me was posting in…
damn it took 8-9 mo for the algorithm to figure it tf out 🫠
“the depth dropoff makes sense too, most people only read one level deep before moving to the next comment, so anything nested twice basically becomes invisible unless the thread is quiet enough that people expand everything. good reframe on the karma farming thing btw, the difference really is intent, if youre saying something because you actually have something to add the numbers just happen to follow, farming is when you reverse that order”
really? these kind of posts encourage me to do tiktok videos!
“youve already found the real answer, and OverOne said it: the scrolling is the time sink, not the commenting. so kill the scrolling. the system that works: stop browsing the feed. the home feed is algorithmic and recycled, youll scroll forever. go to 3-4 specific subs where your buyers actually are, sort by NEW, and search the exact keywords tied to the pain your product solves. relevant posts surface directly. 5 minutes vs an hour. brutal filter. only open a post if you can add something you ca”
“I'd start by reading sub rules. Rule 1 - No soliciting, promotions, etc You'll be received better in subs that allow advertising.”
“I agree with you, we're all different and have our own interests, so you need to find your audience, but with such rigid algorithms as now, it's incredibly difficult. Yes, as an example, I use channels with games, but the videos don't necessarily have to be long.”