Reddit or not
Hello!
Thank you for joining me, I’m so glad you’re here.
I don’t have any kind of intro to start us today, so let’s do a poll instead. Which is the best Christmas dessert?
This week I came across a really interesting chart on LinkedIn:
It shows that when students come to researching colleges, Instagram is still the number one choice, but Reddit has taken a massive leap in the last year and is equal to Instagram for 2023.
Now, I happen to be a Reddit heavy user. I’m even a mod. So this comes to no surprise to me - I can see how gen z are using this platform to get the info they need.
What does surprise me, however, is how few people are tapping into Reddit to help gen z make their big life choices.
So, I thought I’d give you the lowdown on Reddit today. Show you what you might be able to do with it.
First things first, what is Reddit?
Known as the “front page of the internet”, it’s a place where people meet in communities, discussing anything and everything.
It’s a place where people can ask the Ask UK community how to get the dr to sign them off sick.
Where you can share with the Lush community that you’ve found a product to make you smell JUST like a Lush shop.
Men can submit their photos to Hot Dudes with Plants, for all to enjoy (despite the label, it is safe for work and no photos are naked ones).
It’s also where people come together to share new concepts like Overemployment (where you take on two full time roles at the same time, in secret).
Users hide behind usernames, and cartoonish avatars, so it’s often a safe space for people to ask questions they wouldn’t ask out loud, to explore who they are, and to connect with people who share the same ideas, identities and dreams.
How are gen z using Reddit to inform their decisions?
Taking a look at the 6th Form community, you can see how students are using the space to celebrate their university offers, but also giving each other candid advice about what their choices might mean.
It’s quite telling that the Apprenticeships community is almost dead, but the Career Guidance group has questions about them there, too.
Doing a search of “which internship should I choose” brings up heaps of questions in a variety of groups.
Reddit is the perfect place to ask those questions, and (usually) get a range of advice in return. Some of the advice can be pretty awful, and there isn’t really any way for the student to tell good from bad (aside from the comment voting system I guess), so there is a lot of scope for poor information being spread.
How can I use Reddit in my work with gen z?
Reddit is such a goldmine of career examples. If you work in careers advice and want some real world examples to help show your students how broad their options are, Reddit is your place. I quite like this post about salary progression that might be of interest to students (but remember people are more likely to share if they have something to brag about) and this obscure job post has some very cool ideas for careers.
Social listening is where you look at what people are saying about you online, and Reddit is a great place to do that. Find out what people are saying about your course/internship/apprenticeship etc, and use that information to inform changes. You could even see if there are some subtle benefits you’d not considered, which you can take and feed into your marketing.
Feeding better advice can be a good tactic, so long as you don’t have an account that ONLY answers positively about the thing you’re promoting. You may like to flesh things out by adding value to a range of questions but then also answer questions about your organsiation. As with anything, be authentic, because Reddit is a place where people can talk freely so you don’t want to communicate like a shallow advert.
There are some bigger ideas which might work, such as leveraging AMAs (Ask My Anythings). This is a thread where for a certain amount of time someone who is famous/an expert/someone unusual will answer a bunch of questions. There is an AMA community, but I think a thread like this would be much better within a community in the interest group - such as r/University for a uni or r/DevOpps for a DevOpps apprentice employer. You would need to really do your homework on the community and make sure it’s engaged enough to fly - you’d not want for it to be crickets for your AMA time.
Adverts are slowly increasing on Reddit and while I’ve not personally run a campaign on there before, I would imagine you can get a lot more bang for your buck there than on other social platforms.
Because it’s still a bit of a wild west out there, there’s lots of scope to get ahead with an idea that’s not too difficult to put together. I’d love to see more people do exciting things with it to get in front of gen z!
Links
Depressing one to start off, I’m afraid. The STEM gender gap doesn’t look to be getting any smaller, and female students surveyed said that STEM skills aren’t things they think they’d be able to do. So much is being done around this - I wonder what is missing?
And something to lighten the mood again - you can tell someone’s generation by how they wear their socks. (As it happens, despite being a millennial, I wear my socks gen z style…)
An interesting gen z view on performance reviews found on TikTok.
And while I’m on TikTok I have to shout out this Ipswich based company who are just bringing it with hilarious content.
OK, we’re at the end now because my cat Nigel won’t stop screaming at me that it’s dinner time. He’s like you to know that he has NEVER* been fed.
(*in 4 hours).
Until next week,
Charlotte