Accidental Content Lessons Learned from Redditors

by Pamela Williams · November 22, 2023

If you pay close attention to Redditors, you will eventually notice all sorts of marketing lessons in action. Here are a few I found just today…

1: Challenge Your Followers

Hawkeye posted a picture of their dog and wrote, “My dog is cuter than yours, fight me.” Hours later he revealed, “HAHA, my ruse worked. Now I have hundreds of dog photos to look at when I’m down!”

This is a great idea for getting your subscribers and followers to interact with your posts. Get them riled up enough to prove you wrong by posting their own content in the form of photos or short posts.

2: Build Your Own Best Damn Sandcastle in the Galaxy

A Swedish TV channel accidently put subtitles from a kid’s show over a political debate, and it’s brilliant. One screen capture shows a politician holding a newspaper and speaking into a microphone declaring, “I will build the best sandcastle in the galaxy.”

What a great content idea! While you probably don’t want to use photos of politicians, if for example you teach online marketing, you could use pictures of animals ‘talking’ to each other to instruct on how to drive traffic to a website or solve their biggest marketing problem.

And this would work in most any niche. Use photos, illustrations, simple line drawings or whatever you like, as long as it’s out of the ordinary and you have the rights to it.

3: Pull a Prank on Your Readers, Subscribers and Followers

Here’s a prank pulled in high school and posted by catceleste that got everyone wondering what was happening…

“My strangest legacy – in high school, for one reason or another (I can’t remember) my friends and I wrote “34 days until March 2^nd” on the whiteboard in the drama classroom. It was completely arbitrary but we kept it up, “30 days until March 2^nd” and “23 days until March 2^nd” etc. It spread around enough that the entire school is buzzing about what is going to happen on March 2^nd.

“We figure we should think of something and decide to bring in cakes. There were about 13 of us in total committed to bringing a cake. On March 2^nd, during 3^rd period lunch we all entered the cafeteria in a line forming the parade of the cakes and laid them out – a grand cake buffet for everyone in that lunch period. We did it the next year. And after we graduated it kept going.

“This past March 2^nd was the 9^th year they’ve done it. It’s become a school sponsored event. There are t-shirts for this thing every year. March 2^nd is cake day.”

You can do this as a one-off in your business, posting on your site and on social media that there are “X” number of days until “X date”. Or you could even make it an annual event. This could be something as simple as a sale or something much bigger with online events, prizes and more. You could also work with other marketers to create a truly big event that people look forward to each year.

4: Give Good News, Bad News

Is storytelling something you’re not all that good at? Don’t despair. Here’s the perfect example of how to tell a story through the “good news, bad news” method. A-fragile-sort-of-anarchy posted…

Bad News: Our boss locked the keys inside the building.

Good News: We didn’t have to wait around for a locksmith.

Bad News: My boss finds it very concerning that I know how to pick locks and tried to unlock my Tragic Backstory. I was too embarrassed to admit that the reason I learned was because, at thirteen, I figured that was the kind of skill that would impress cute girls.

Good News: A cute girl saw me do it.

Bad News: It was Maggie, and since she’s already seen me fall out of several trees, cry because I saw a fawn that was just too small, and knows I can ride a unicycle, she’ll never think I’m cool no matter what I do. It’s too late. She knows.

To this post Sailorbryant replied, “There are million dollar blockbuster movies that were less entertaining than the rollercoaster this post just took me on.”

Need content for your next email, blogpost or social media post? Try using the good news bad news technique.

5: Stop Stressing and Start Telling

Posted by Barbara: “My toaster caught on fire yesterday and when I realized it there was a flame like two feet high almost touching my cabinets so I panicked and picked it up so it wouldn’t catch my cabinets on fire but then I was just standing in my kitchen holding a flaming toaster and my dad saw me and didn’t say anything and I didn’t know what to do so I ran outside with it and threw it at the ground but it was on fire so I picked it up and threw it again and again until it went out but then my grass was on fire so I beat it with a shovel until that went out too. Then I came back inside and my dad was just like, “Whatcha cookin’, Barb?”

Lesson learned: Run on sentences don’t matter if the story is good enough. Relax about your phrasing, grammar and punctuation and just tell your story.

6: Get Three Year Olds to Write Your Content

Matthew Mulligan wrote, “Hi @dublinbusnews my three year old wanted to know how you decide which buses get to sleep inside the depot garage and which have to sleep out in the yard.”

Dublin Bus replied, “Hi Matthew, we have rang around to a few of the depots and we can confirm that all buses are loved equally and take turns sleeping inside the warm depot. Thos sleeping outside are given cocoa to keep warm.”

Do you know any little kids? Give them an explanation of what it is that you do, and then let them ask you questions about it. Their questions paired with your answers can create humous content that gets shared.

7: Develop Your Own Language for Your Tribe

Matttomic writes, “It’s a good thing we named most of the dinosaurs like a hundred years ago when all we were into was mythology and speaking Latin, if they just learned about dinosaurs now and had to name 100’s there’d be a Heckin Chonkosaurus and a Northern Thick Scaleyboy.”

I’ve seen newlyweds who invent their own language that only the two of them can understand. (What, me? No way, I never did that.) Redditors have their own language as well, calling snakes “danger noodles” and bats “skypups.”

Why not invent a few words that only your own followers know, understand and learn to use? This is just one more thing that will make them feel like they’re insiders to a private, exclusive club of like-minded people.