{"id":260,"date":"2017-11-08T12:37:28","date_gmt":"2017-11-08T12:37:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/?p=260"},"modified":"2023-04-27T09:49:05","modified_gmt":"2023-04-27T08:49:05","slug":"using-social-media-reddit-ama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/2017\/11\/08\/using-social-media-reddit-ama\/","title":{"rendered":"Using Social Media to promote your research: Reddit AMAs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reddit<\/a> <\/strong>is a social news website that\u00a0has become a major\u00a0driver of traffic to blog posts, videos, images and news articles.\u00a0Reddit offers a significant platform for social scientists to disseminate work and engage with the public – this post focuses in particular on ‘Ask Me Anything’ posts (AMAs) in the Science sub-reddit<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

This post was written by Alastair McCloskey<\/strong> –\u00a0<\/strong>Alastair is Digital Content Coordinator in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Sheffield, where he promotes research across social media and the web.\u00a0As well as being a long time redditor, you can find Alastair on Twitter (@gravityvictims<\/a>) where he\u2019s happy to answer any questions on reddit as a platform for online engagement.\u00a0 This post was first published on the\u00a0LSE Impact blog<\/a>\u00a0in May 2016 – you can read the original post\u00a0here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reddit offers a significant platform for social scientists to disseminate work and engage with the public. Below, Alastair shares his experience of using Reddit to engage wider audiences with research. Despite only occasionally submitting content to the site, the Faculty website received nearly ten times the amount of traffic from Reddit compared to referrals from Twitter.<\/p>\n

Editor note: I use Reddit on a daily basis, so for any general queries on using Reddit please feel free to email us<\/a>.<\/h6>\n

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Today I Learned (TIL): Using Reddit as a tool for public engagement, profile raising and scholarly dissemination<\/a><\/h2>\n

Over the last few years actors, musicians, astronauts and even US presidents have tapped into the enormous audience of social news website Reddit through one of the site\u2019s famous online Q&A sessions known as an AMA (\u2018Ask Me Anything\u2019).\u00a0But the AMA is not just the preserve of the Obamas and Snoop Doggs of the world.\u00a0 Among the \u2018mildly interesting\u2019 photos of vending machines, US current affairs, and golden retriever GIFs that usually make up Reddit\u2019s homepage, it is common to see Ask Me Anythings with academics from across the physical, biological and social sciences disciplines discussing the intricacies of their research with tens of thousands of people online.<\/p>\n

For those unfamiliar with Reddit, it looks like a step back into the web\u2019s past \u2013 an ever-changing, seemingly tricky to navigate mess of subsections, text, links, photos, comments and odd abbreviations (TIL \u2013 Today I Learned, ELI5 \u2013 Explain Like I\u2019m 5,\u00a0and many more<\/a>). Despite this, its popularity is undeniable and the self-styled \u2018front page of the internet\u2019 boasted 250 million unique visitors and 8 billion page views in April 2016.<\/p>\n

Users submit content to the most relevant community known as a subreddit. Other redditors are then able to upvote, downvote and comment on the content which affects the overall \u2018karma\u2019 of a post. An algorithm (fantastically explained in this\u00a0blog<\/a>), takes into account a submission\u2019s upvotes, downvotes, and time since it was submitted to decide how well it is performing. The best content rises to the top and the worst sinks into obscurity. The home page constantly pulls the best performing content from the largest subreddits creating a snapshot of what\u2019s going on across the site and putting it on view to a potential audience of millions.<\/p>\n

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With more than 11 million subscribers, the\u00a0r\/science<\/a>\u00a0community is one the Reddit\u2019s largest and most active communities. Run by a team of moderators who keep discussions civil and on topic, it hosts AMAs almost daily with academics discussing their work with an audience of thousands of fellow researchers, students and others with an interest in science.\u00a0It offers the perfect platform for researchers to connect with Reddit\u2019s massive built-in following. Increasingly US universities and research organisations, such as the American Chemical Society and mega-journal PLOS One, are making regular use of science AMAs as a way of boosting interest in their work, and raising the profile of academics with a global audience.<\/p>\n

It seemed like too good an opportunity to ignore, and so we asked one of our Faculty academics to help us test the potential reach of a Reddit science AMA.\u00a0Our willing subjects were\u00a0Dr Todd Hartman<\/a>, a Lecturer in Quantitative Methods at the Sheffield Methods Institute, and\u00a0Dr Rhys Hester<\/a>\u00a0from the Robina Institute at the University of Minnesota, who co-authored on a recent paper about racial bias in criminal sentencing in South Carolina. Their research had been widely picked up\u00a0by the media<\/a>, and it was a topic that seemed likely to pique the interest of Reddit\u2019s science community and beyond.<\/p>\n

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Image credit: Screenshot from the\u00a0Racial Bias AMA<\/a><\/p>\n

Setting up the AMA couldn\u2019t have been easier as the r\/science team provide\u00a0a step by step guide<\/a>, a Google Calendar to check which dates are free and create a dedicated account for the session.\u00a0So on our scheduled afternoon, we posted\u00a0our AMA thread<\/a>\u00a0and watched as question after question came in. In under an hour the thread was top of the science subreddit and climbing its way up Reddit\u2019s front page.\u00a0There were detailed discussions around the methodologies used, justice system reforms, media interpretation of the research and the limits of the dataset.\u00a0For Todd and Rhys, it was an opportunity to set aside a few hours and talk openly and in-depth about their work with a knowledgeable and inquisitive audience that went beyond academia. And despite some frantic typing to keep up with the evolving discussion and follow up questions, they both said it was a lot of fun.<\/p>\n

In 24 hours, the AMA had been viewed by around 45,000 people with 600 comments and questions. The thread received thousands of upvotes and reached number six on Reddit\u2019s homepage \u2013 kept out of the top five by\u00a0this polar bear<\/a>. Would this kind of reach been possible via a Q&A on Twitter or Facebook? Possibly \u2013 but it would require hours of promotion, an enormous existing following on social media and probably a few planted questions to get the ball rolling. All things that Reddit\u2019s AMA format removes the need for.<\/p>\n

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Image credit: reddit homepage screenshot featuring Dr Rhys Hester and Dr Todd Hartman\u2019s AMA<\/p>\n

And Reddit does not just offer opportunities for social scientists to talk about their research, but also disseminate it.\u00a0The site has built a reputation over the years as being a driver of huge amounts of traffic to blog posts, videos, images and news articles. The effect on traffic to a website that reaches the top of a popular subreddit can be phenomenal, and millions of views are possible in the space of just a few hours for content that hits the heights of the homepage.<\/p>\n

Despite only occasionally submitting content from our Faculty website to relevant subreddits, we received nearly ten times the amount of traffic compared to referrals from Twitter last year. While the majority of this comes from the US, it has also significantly helped to showcase our research worldwide by boosting our hits from Europe, Asia and Australia.<\/p>\n

So is it all plain sailing? Nope! Be wary of just using Reddit to overtly promote your own content \u2013 it\u2019s seriously frowned upon and considered \u2018bad reddiquette\u2019. AMAs too can backfire if seen as just a chance to advertise a latest work or interviewees don\u2019t go with the flow of conversation\u2026just ask\u00a0Woody Harrelson<\/a>\u00a0amongst others. Each subreddit also has its own set of rules around types of content that can be posted, and submissions that ignore these are usually swiftly deleted. However, contribute to the Reddit community with insightful comments and interesting content, and you\u2019ll start to see the power of the internet\u2019s front page.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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