Outside of traditional job sites, the list of platforms employers and agencies consider when advertising job openings and employer brand is pretty short. The list starts at Google and usually ends at Facebook. Between those two, you can get in front of just about everyone online.
It’s a bit lazy though. If companies are really doing their job, cost, and competition should force them to look at other options to cut through the clutter, particularly with advertising options that have scale and appeal to a particular demographic.
Reddit is one such option, especially for employers looking to get in front of a young audience — the ones that aren’t on Facebook and Google all that much. I wrote about Reddit as a recruitment marketing strategy a year ago, and haven’t wavered. Check it out if you want a refresher.
With over 300 million unique users engaging every month, Reddit’s strength is among 18-29 year old males. The audience is evenly spread across income categories, and has a u-shaped distribution educationally, meaning high school degrees and college undergraduate degrees are both equally likely to use the social network.
Women find the site less appealing, but one study found that 5 percent of women aged 30-49 say they use the network, which is the same proportion as younger women. Overall, six percent of the people surveyed said that they had ever used the service.
So, the demographics might line up with what you want, but here are five other reasons to give Reddit a look.
- Interest: Reach an entire interest group, like “programming” or “marketing.” These segments on Reddit show interest towards pre-determined topics based on user browsing behavior.
- Subreddit: Subreddits range anywhere from r/Aww to r/Zoomies. Use subreddit targeting to reach the followers of a specific subreddit. What the hell’s a subreddit? Click here.
- Location: Use location targeting to serve ads based on country, state, or city.
- Device: Use device targeting to serve ads to users browsing on Desktop, iOS, or Android. Youth lives on mobile.
- Exclusion: Targeting techies but don’t need Microsofties? Negatively target r/ASP or r/Microsoft by excluding the subreddit.
I’ll throw in the rumor that Reddit is reportedly considering an IPO, which means awareness and traffic to the site is likely to increase as news drips out on a regular basis. It could also be an acquisition target for someone like Google, which has had a particularly bad time at social media. The time to throw a little bit of budget at Reddit is now.