Reddit Overtakes TikTok: What Does its 88% Growth Mean for your Influencer Marketing Strategy?

What is Reddit?

At its core, Reddit is the self-proclaimed ‘heart of the internet,’ and for good reason. It’s a vast and often bewildering digital landscape where millions of users converge daily to share, discuss, and discover content on virtually any topic imaginable. In fact, Reddit has overtaken TikTok as the UK’s fourth most-visited social site, experiencing an 88% growth. Unlike traditional social media platforms that often centre around personal profiles and curated feeds, Reddit is built entirely around communities and content, making it a unique and addictive beast in the online world.

The platform fosters an ecosystem that thrives on user-generated content and community co-creation. It’s a melting pot of niche interests, breaking news, deep dives, memes, and discussions, organised and governed by its users. The beauty of Reddit lies in its ability to connect people with shared passions, no matter how obscure (Criminal Minds memes, anyone?), and to surface the most relevant or entertaining information through a truly democratic process: up-voting and down-voting.

Understanding Reddit’s core mechanics is key to navigating its sprawling universe. The first crucial concept is the subreddit. Think individual forums and dedicated communities focusing on a specific subject (from r/technology for the latest tech news and r/askreddit for questions, to r/aww for pictures of cute animals). Users subscribe to subreddits that align with their interests, creating a stream of personalised content directly on their feeds. Each subreddit has its own rules, member culture, and a team of moderators who enforce these guidelines and ensure the users stay on topic.

Who Uses Reddit? What You Need to Know About this Melting Pot of Users

At face value, Reddit’s user base is expansive. Globally, there are over half a billion Reddit users flocking to the platform to engage within these niche communities, with two-thirds of these users being male. In the US, approximately 44% of Redditors are between the ages of 18 to 29 years old, with 49.59% of the platform’s daily users coming from the US, with India, UK, Canada, Brazil and Germany also boasting significant user bases. Redditors are Redditing everywhere, particularly on the move. In fact, there are over 3/5x more mobile Reddit visits than desktop visits per month, logging in to listen and share their opinions on niche subjects.

With niche communities being more easily available to younger audiences through the likes of TikTok and Instagram, Reddit has been able to thrive as a hub for these shared interests.

However, taking a deeper dive into their activities, the audiences begin to spread into over 100,000 communities. Here are some interesting stats about Reddit communities:

• Trust in Reddit has increased by 19% in the US, with users across various age demographics stating they are increasingly putting faith in Reddit answers alongside other informative online sources like social media and traditional search.

• Entertainment is the top reason (72%) Redditors engage with the platform.
• The most popular subreddit globally is r/funny. Boasting over 67 million subscribers, this subreddit shares content purely meant to make users laugh.
• Reddit is the only social platform seeing significant YoY increases in time spent in 2025 across the US, with Reddit achieving 3.7% increase in time spent on the platform by US adult social network platforms.
• Reddit’s Chief Revenue Office Mike Romoff shared that almost half of the discussions on Reddit are commerce diven. From people turning to the site for research, and even reviews when choosing what to buy, Reddit has become the mecca for the intentional consumer. 

So, with a huge prevalence in commerce-focused queries and conversations, how can brands use Reddit to better enhance their influencer marketing strategies?

How Brands Can Leverage Reddit 

Reddit as a Social Listening Tool 

Unlike many other social platforms, Reddit has unparalleled access into the sentiments of a consumer. Brands are able to track and analyse online conversations about brand, audience, industry, and competitors to gain insights that actually inform strategy, understand sentiment, manage reputation, and identify market trends. Understanding the role a brand plays in a consumer’s life, and how they’re feeling towards how they’ve been marketed to, allows for more dedicated targeting both across Reddit and other social media platforms as a whole.

As Reddit’s latest Creative Trends report highlights, Reddit’s unique, community-driven structure fosters unfiltered opinions and genuine discussions that rarely appear elsewhere. This makes it an invaluable platform for deep social listening. By actively monitoring relevant subreddits, brands can gain real-time insights into consumer perceptions of their own brand, the broader industry landscape, and even competitor strategies. This direct access to genuine sentiment helps in understanding audience interests, identifying pain points, and pinpointing emerging market trends.

In fact, Reddit inspired the iconic Michael Cera, CeraVe campaign. Taking to Super Bowl LVIII, the campaign concept came from a Reddit post their team found on r/stupidquestions. 

The post: ‘Did Michael Cera develop CeraVe?’ 

The ad played on this jokey concept; that Superbad and Scott Pilgrim actor Michael Cera produced the award-winning, staple skincare brand. The campaign earned 32 billion impressions with record-breaking sales in just one week.

Ultimately, the candid feedback found on Reddit goes beyond surface-level metrics, providing crucial data to inform strategy, refine marketing efforts, manage reputation proactively, and guide product development. Reddit offers the raw, unvarnished truth, making it an indispensable asset for truly understanding and connecting with target audiences.

Using Active Community Builders

Beyond passive listening, brands can actively engage with Reddit’s vibrant communities by strategically partnering with its most influential and credible members. This involves more than just identifying popular users; it means collaborating with established community builders who genuinely understand and contribute to the subreddit’s culture. The focus should always be on delivering value-first messaging that naturally aligns with the community’s interests, rather than resorting to overt or aggressive brand promotion. This is the key to Reddit, a genuine approach will always resonate more than a hard sell.

One highly effective way to foster direct engagement is by exploring mod-approved AMA (Ask Me Anything) partnerships. These sessions allow brands to directly answer user questions, share expertise, and build trust in a transparent and interactive format, provided they respect community guidelines and deliver real value. Furthermore, cultivating long-term relationships with these influential community members can lead to organic mentions and genuine advocacy, which are far more powerful than paid endorsements on a platform where users are highly discerning. 

Take Rhode. They’ve leveraged their community in various ways, particularly by inviting loyal, non-influencer Redditors to test and review upcoming products. Not only did they receive an unfiltered perspective on their newest products, but fellow Redditors lauded this approach, explicitly stating their appreciation for reviews from ‘real customers’ over ‘conventional influencers’.

Reddit AI integration

It’s clear that Reddit isn’t just a place for memes and discussions anymore. In fact, it’s become a massive player in the AI space, dominating opinion-based queries. Reddit landed a series of strategic partnerships including a Google deal reportedly worth $60 million, integrating real-time access to Reddit’s data API for training their AI tools (similarly with ChatGPT’s Open AI tools, converging their tech to make data more accessible to users and moderators.) In return, Reddit has been able to supercharge its own search using Google AI tools. 

These go beyond minor deals, highlighting how crucial Reddit’s content is becoming for shaping these AI models we all inevitably tap into. 

Beyond their partnerships, the sheer volume and quality of information Reddit provides is unlike any other social media platform globally. Profound found that Reddit is the most cited domain for AI models across the board, beating out publishing giants like YouTube and Forbes, with 2.2% across Google AI, 1.8% across Chat GPT, and 6.6% for Perplexity in total percentages of citations.

So, what does this mean?

The organic, diverse, and often very niche conversations happening across Reddit are becoming the bedrock of what these Large Language Models (LLMs) learn. The platform has played a significant role in shaping the answers it gives you. Here’s a few reasons you should be considering Reddit’s AI capabilities in your strategy:

Understanding Your Brand’s Real-World Perception: 

By integrating Reddit insights, you can accurately gauge true brand sentiment and authority. This allows you to understand if people genuinely like your products, what pain points they discuss, and ultimately, whether that sentiment will be reflected in an AI’s summary or recommendation to a potential customer, well before they make a purchase.

Uncovering Niche Insights and Emerging Trends: 

Reddit is a breeding ground for dedicated communities and early discussions around new ideas, problems, and products. Leveraging AI to analyse this vast, unfiltered data can give you an unparalleled early warning system for market shifts, emerging trends, and unmet customer needs in your industry. It’s like having a finger on the pulse of countless passionate communities, providing deeper, more authentic insights than traditional market research.

Shaping Future AI Interactions: 

As mentioned, almost half of Reddit conversations are commerce driven. As Reddit content increasingly informs LLMs, understanding and strategically contributing (or at least observing) within relevant subreddits can influence the very answers and information AI models provide about your industry, products, or services. With GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) making head-waves, ensuring that the knowledge AI draws from brand sentiments and product reviews are aligned with your strategic goals is paramount. 

What to Watch Out for on Reddit?

Whilst Reddit is a great source of information, it’s really important to understand its unique culture. As the CEO of Reddit Steve Huffman put it “Reddit is the most human place on the internet in a world flooded with AI slop.” People on Reddit value community and transparency, generally not responding to hard sell tactics and traditional advertising. Pushing marketing messages too directly can often lead to negative reactions, like downvotes or critical comments, which can negatively impact your brand reputation within these subreddits and across AI search. So instead, of treating it as another ad channel, it’s much more effective to use the platform as a powerful tool for deep research and genuine engagement. Focus on understanding what people are truly talking about, what they like and dislike, and how you can contribute to these conversations.

Reddit Key Takeaways

Reddit for increased visibility

With Reddit’s content now actively training leading AI models (like Google and ChatGPT), brand presence and positive sentiment on the platform will increasingly influence how AI answers queries about a brand, products, or industry. From Dove’s transparency-focused campaign on the platform – allowing users to share honest feedback – to the Rhode Reddit community, brands need to change the way they show up on social listening tools.

Going beyond recognising your audience

Reddit acts as an unfiltered focus group. Not just identifying your audience but listening to your audience. Understanding sentiments and identifying trends to inform your strategy.

Behaviour change 

As AI-generated content floods social feeds, people are seeking genuine human discussion, reviews, and lived experience. Reddit feels like an antidote to the endless algorithmic slop found elsewhere.

Reddit as research platform

Reddit is a powerful research platform, informing some of the most iconic campaigns. From Rhode to CeraVe, Reddit is way ahead of the curve when it comes to understanding audiences. Whether it’s brand sentiment, the perceptions surrounding creators and influencers – including if there’s any concerning news out there – it’s well worth doing some digging, especially if you’re looking for a long term ambassadorship or campaign. 

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