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)
“Can you share the subreddit names where you posted about your product. I am an aspiring founder, new to reddit and wish to learn Reddit marketing.”
“Recently launched our startup, trued reddit ads and they didn’t work well. Even though I seriously think that Reddit community has our ICP sitting here but the ads didn’t work out well. Has anyone tried out reddit ads and how did it work out for them? Also trying to activate influencer marketing, what’s the best channel anyone has used for influencer marketing for SaaS? Lastly we are using cold outreach, ads, content, partnerships with G2, product hunt. What else is there that helps in distribut”
“I looked back at a small batch of Reddit comments we wrote for a SaaS account, and the awkward ones were not awkward because they mentioned the product. Most of them did not. They were awkward because they answered like a blog post. Too complete. Too balanced. Too eager to explain the whole lesson. The kind of reply that technically makes sense, but does not sound like it belongs under the comment above it. The better ones were usually smaller. They picked one detail from the thread, added one p”
“posted here yesterday that all my traceable signups come from comment replies, zero from posts. a few of you added your own data and it sharpened the pattern enough to share round two it's specifically the OBJECTION comments that convert. "what happens to my data." "why would i trust an unverified app." "this is just siri." when i answer those straight, admit the limitation, explain the actual reason, that person converts at a rate the friendly comments never to”
“the recommendation-vs-ad framing is exactly it. a reply inherits the credibility of being addressed to a person. an ad is addressed to everyone which means no one”
“respect for building the tool version of the grind, the searching-and-sorting-by-new ritual is real. the part i'd steal from your approach is speed to the thread, being reply #2 vs #20 probably matters more than anything i wrote”
“built Pounce literally because i was doing this manually every day, searching keywords and sorting by new to find the exact skeptical comments you're describing. the conversion pattern holds at bigger scale too, i just ran out of hours before i ran out of good threads to reply in.”
“support in public is honestly the highest converting content i've ever posted and i never plan it, it just happens when something breaks.”
“Same pattern here. I think it's because a comment responding to someone's specific problem looks like a recommendation from a person, not a pitch from a company. The trust bar is completely different. Posts feel like ads even when they're genuine. Comments feel like advice from someone who happened to walk by. The bug-fix-apology one is funny because that's basically support in public, which is its own kind of marketing nobody budgets for.”
“running dexi (imessage assistant, no ui, posted here about it before) on a $0 reddit motion for a week and the attribution surprised me enough to share the posts get the views. the comments get the signups. every single conversion i can trace came from me replying to a specific person's skeptical or curious comment, honestly, with no pitch, sometimes just fixing their objection. one guy hit a signup bug, i apologized in a reply, he came back and converted. the post above that comment thread”
“I actively use X and replies daily and my one reply got over 150k impressions for me , it was my first time very happy for that but posts barely get any views .”
“Actually checked for this by looking at removal rates within the same age brackets across different sizes and the pattern held a 2-year-old sub with 50k members got posts removed at basically the same rate as one with 500k, so the moderation consistency seems to come from having established norms over time rather than just having more time to exist.”
“new here ,don't know how to grow reddit followers? r/SEO submitted by /u/BeautifulCaptain8249 [link] [comments]”
“https://preview.redd.it/2qwvq9lssudh1.png?width=2336&format=png&auto=webp&s=5fa2f1df0cbc3ccf0626ee30fba1d648075a819f Pinterest organic + tiktok paid (the last one only 45 users) and SEO of my web apparently”
spent a week chasing that null return on the insights scope.
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“yeah I get what you are saying. And i know you didn't ask for my advice :) but its reddit, so i'm gonna give it anyway. Start local, the more local the better - people tell people about dating, and you'll need enough local people to go on dates with. So better to have 100 users in London, than a 1000 all over the world. Don't stop international traffic, just focus your UA on one area and expand from there.”
“I'm very new to reddit so I'm a bad judge but in just the last couple of days I had so many interesting and fun interactions, thoughtful comments with dozens of people genuinely trying to help. Despite the AI slop, which I also see, this platform is a thousand times better than Twitter or LinkedIn, not even mentioning Facebook or Insta”
“Noted with thanks. Thanks for sharing! What places and communities would you say are the most underrated?”
“So I can see that people are engaging with posts and they have very good engagement too. But when I am posting and asking a question, there is no one who is answering my question. Is there something that I am missing out on?”
“thanks man , not 100% sure tbh, my guess is a lot of those impressions are from really specific long-tail searches that match my title almost exactly, so even at a bad position people still click”
“I've seen a lot of advice around Reddit ranging from "never mention your product" to "Reddit can be an incredible growth channel if you do it right." For those of you who have actually gained meaningful traction (users, customers, subscribers, downloads, etc.) from Reddit: What specifically worked? At what point did you mention your product, website, or business? Were you including links in posts, dropping them in comments, or waiting for people to ask? How often were you”
“tried a few of these and honestly most just find threads then leave you to write everything. softshill . com actually drafts the replies for you which saves a ton of time, you just post what looks good. been using it maybe a month and it's way less work than doing it manually or using tools that only do half the job”
“Spam is spam, no matter how you encapsulate it. A reply is only helpful if the person behind it is human. People post in communities for human replies and real sentiment. If a bot is the one replying, it's no different from just asking ChatGPT.”
“So I made a post here on Self-hosted and noticed something unusual. As soon as page refreshed there were 32 views. I thought wow so many people browsing this sub. But it took me a few seconds to think.....may be it's bots. So I refreshed page again....must have been 30-40 seconds and the views were 124. 124 views in less than a minute? submitted by /u/Automatic_Echo_7598 [link] [comments]”
“searching "how do i" on here is how i got my first signups. reading their complaints lets me sprinkle those exact phrases onto my landing page, it's like seasoning to taste.”
“Your approach is good - setting up f5bot and understand the pains and solve the users problem. Do you have any stats for the same like how many people upvoted your comment or how many visited your site because of your comments?”
“That’s exactly the kind of workflow I had in mind. Glad to hear it’s working well after two weeks. Thanks for sharing this. Can I ask why you chose to have it custom-built instead of using off-the-shelf software or handing the work off to a VA?”
“I'd probably stay pretty close to the actual conversations instead of blasting the same message everywhere, and that's basically the only part of reddit outreach that's ever felt less stupid to me.”
“the manual-vs-bot line is a distraction. what actually decides if reddit outreach works is whether each comment would still earn its spot with the product mention stripped out, and a human keyword-matching a founder into threads where they add nothing gets flagged as spam just as fast as any bot. the labor isn't the moat, the usefulness of the comment on its own is.”
“I used to think Reddit wasn't the right place for an ecommerce brand because people here can spot marketing from a mile away. After spending a few months in different communities, I realized I had the wrong approach. The first time I mentioned my product, nobody cared. The posts that actually got meaningful responses were the ones where I talked about problems I was trying to solve, shared lessons from customer feedback or admitted mistakes I'd made along the way. One conversation comple”
“the auto-removed post almost certainly tripped a self-promo/link filter, not the content, thats the usual reason near-identical posts get one spike and one instant removal. the transferable win from the one that worked: you led with a specific number and a real failure, so it reads as a peer sharing, not a founder marketing. to make a spike like this compound, put the soft capture (waitlist or dm) in a comment, not the post body, so you keep the reach without tripping the filter.”
“written rules are just documentation. wiki is always out of date. automod config is what actually runs.”
“which post got auto-removed and do you know why? asking because i've been trying to figure out the pattern myself - some of my stuff gets nuked instantly and others survive, and i can't tell if it's the subreddit rules, the way i'm framing it, or just random.”
“Organic drops are real, but imo the sub size matters more than ever. I've had way better results in tiny niche subs (<10k) where I'm actually part of the community than in the big ones. If you're just dropping links, yeah it's dead. If you're answering questions and sharing real experience over weeks, people still click through.”
“I posted my app to my local subreddits r/Belfast and r/northernireland expecting to get down voted for promoting my stuff. Actually got quite a good response and a few paying customers off the back of it. I was handing out free promo codes for my game, so that probably helped.”
The whole guru circus is designed to keep you watching, not to teach you anything useful. What worked for me was stopping the YouTube rabbit hole completely and just hanging around in…
“"I’m so curious what type of people apply off a Reddit post" Why does where the job is posted matter?”
“I’d wait if you don’t think you’d hit the sub. I only sign up for stuff I know with near certainty I’d hit.”
“This is the part most people miss: Reddit isn’t one channel, it’s 1000 tiny rooms with different social rules. Same post can be useful in one and cringe in another.”
“Go to basics, what is the objective? Are you looking to build awareness via socials then enter funnel on a landing page? What are you trying to achieve, randomly posting and complaining about engagement is insane.”
“The ones who get it right spend months just lurking and commenting before they ever think about pitching anything.”
“Keep showing up on the right places, here is one of them r/LookWhatTheyBuilt”
“I love the “distribution > product” take, but I think most people misread this and try to copy your exact subs and post formats instead of reverse engineering their buyer’s language. I nuked a month posting polished case studies; what finally worked was screenshots of my own screwups and very unpolished breakdowns of what I’d do differently. People smell “playbook” posts a mile away now. I still run a similar loop, but I use Pulse for Reddit to watch how my target users actually phrase their”
“I largely agree, but remember Reddit existed alongside Digg - it didn't follow on from it. Also I think the landscape is very different now. I came from Digg too. Back then the vast majority of internet users didn't even know about Digg or understand what it was. Now, Reddit is one of the largest sites on the internet. People understand the model and there seems to be a growing dissatisfaction with it (Reddit locking people into their phone app, overly zealous moderation, a growing dissa”
“Reddit benefitted from Digg taking a massive wrong turn when it moved away from user generated content, which was the key thing people wanted. Reddit will need to do a similar suicide for any other platform/ replacement to take off. I was a hard digg guy when they made that change and essentially ended themselves overnight.”
“I've been posting build-in-public stuff on here for a while now. mostly on r/SaaS . Got lucky with a few of them. three or four hit #1, two crossed ~200 upvotes, and the last one did over 328k views. so on paper the reach is there. But here's the part that's been bugging me. that last post that did 328k views got me 3 or 4 new users. and total, across everything I've ever posted on reddit, i'm still under 100 users. So people are clearly reading and the topics land. i just ha”