How to Find Customers on Reddit with Social Listening

by Fed

Published 2021-11-28, updated 2025-01-28

Social Listening as a Customer Acquisition Tool

Social listening is the process of monitoring mentions of keywords online that are relevant to your business. Keywords can include your brand name, product descriptions, customer pain points, or even competitor names.

While you can do this across platforms like Twitter (X), Instagram, or LinkedIn using tools like Hootsuite or Brandwatch, Reddit deserves special attention.

Unlike other platforms, Reddit has the most detailed, text-based conversations. Plus:

People often ask for product recommendations on Reddit or complain about their (sometimes solvable) problems.
Unlike ads, it doesn't cost money to engage in online communities on Reddit.
Unlike SEO, social listening doesn't require a lot of time to start seeing results.
It's quick to set up and it continues to pay off over time.

For a deeper dive into the benefits and use cases of social listening, add my startup guide to social listening to your reading list. In today’s guide, I’ll walk you through using the social listening feature on GummySearch to discover conversations on Reddit where you could land a new customer just by participating in the comments.

Reddit Social Listening Playbook (featuring GummySearch!)

First Things First, Go In with a Goal

It’s always a good idea to start social listening with a goal in mind. Are you looking to generate leads, understand your competitors, or spot emerging trends? Knowing what you want helps you focus on the right conversations and keywords, especially with Reddit’s endless amounts of information.

For example, if your goal is to generate leads, you’d want to track phrases like “best tools for X” or “any recommendations for Y” in subreddits where your target audience hangs out. If you’re trying to understand competitors, you’d monitor mentions of their names or products to see what people are loving or complaining about. But don’t worry, I’ll talk a bit more about which keywords to track later.

And…Use GummySearch

Without the right setup, social listening can get overwhelming. With GummySearch, you can cut through the noise by focusing specifically on Reddit communities, tracking relevant keywords, and staying on top of the conversations that really matter to your business.

GummySearch tracks keyword mentions across relevant communities on Reddit and notifies you when a new submission or comment pops up. These could get you in touch with a potential lead or even a new customer.

For this walkthrough, I’ll take on the persona of a SaaS founder looking to create a marketing analytics platform for small businesses. Here’s their step-by-step.

1. Create an Audience

Although it's possible to track keywords across ALL of Reddit, you might get more noise than signal. I recommend compiling an audience of Subreddits so that you're listening in on the conversations relevant to your niche.

You can track different keywords across multiple audiences, which is helpful when your product/business is positioned towards multiple user types.

The audience I specifically created for Startup Founders

2. Search a Keyword Phrase to Start Monitoring

You should monitor many types of keywords to find potential customer leads on Reddit, and I'll cover all of them below. As an example, if you're creating a marketing analytics platform, you could search for something as simple as a "marketing analytics platform" to find conversations where people are asking their community for product recommendations.

You can search for a keyword from the audience's "browse" page, or from the conversations feature. Both will have similar results, but the conversations page has some slightly more options to customize your search.

Search for a particular keyword in the audience.

The conversations result page shows the most recent instances of this phrase in the communities you've selected for your search. It also shows the frequency of this keyword. This is important!

If your keyword isn't happening often enough, you might want to try different ones or add more communities to your audience. If your keyword happens too frequently, you might get "notification fatigue" from all the matches. Make sure the results are relevant to what you are looking for.

For example, you can expand your ground by looking for the word “analytics” only. The result might not be as accurate, but you might find some gems.

If you’d like to shortcut your search even further, you can always get help from AI. All you have to do is ask! Just go to the Ask ✨ tab and type in what you’d like to learn. You’ll get specific answers that match your request, along with their respective sources.

AI-based answers to marketing analytics platform problems/solution requests, with sources

3. Plug Your Product/Business as Appropriate

Right off the bat, you'll likely see plenty of existing results for your search. If you scroll through and find somewhere that people are asking for your product, go ahead and write a thoughtful comment and link to your website.

Thankfully, promoting in Reddit comments is much less moderated than submissions. However, you should still make sure that you're adding more to the community than you take, and only mention your product if it's addressing the question/recommendation/problem that the conversation is about.

Sometimes, you'll have some recent conversations that pop up in your results. That's the ideal scenario because you'll be answering a current open question/request, and you'll also get more eyes on your answer.

For example, take a look at the following Reddit post-AI brought to us:

At the time of this post, this submission had no comments. If you were building an analytics platform that addressed this very issue, you could win yourself a customer – or at least a great interview candidate. Even without that feature, you could test that great data-driven idea.

You'll also probably get some older submissions that match your search as well. These can still be useful to read from a market research perspective, but most likely the original poster has already gotten their question answered. If you come in 10 months late with your product recommendation, it'll fall on deaf ears. I recommend saving your plugs for recent conversations, or those that have a high amount of upvotes and search engines index the thread.

4. Track the Keyword for Future Mentions

Being in the right place at the right time on Reddit can really pay off. By tracking the keywords that lead to business-relevant conversations, you always have an opportunity to jump into the conversation right when it happens.

If you provide a thoughtful & helpful comment early on a submission on Reddit, your comment is likely to be upvoted early in the submission's lifecycle. If it is one of the top comments, it tends to stay there because those are the comments that others read first and upvote. On top of that, if you upvote the actual submission early and add a comment, you're giving that submission a helpful boost in the Reddit algorithm.

I personally use this method of driving traffic to my sites pretty much every day. I've had times when a single well-timed comment brings over 100 visitors to my site, and those are typically fairly high-intent individuals as they were already taking the time to read a Reddit submission on the topic at hand.

To track a keyword in GummySearch, just press the "Track" button after you make a keyword search and confirm that the results are relevant, and the frequency is reasonable.

Once you confirm the results are accurate, track a keyword in your audience.

When there's a new conversation containing any of your tracked keywords, you'll see a notification in the GummySearch app. If you have email digests enabled, you'll get an email containing the conversations that match.

You’ll find all of your tracked keywords on the Conversations 💬 page. You can toggle the “Stats” button to view the performance, efficiency, and frequency of mentions for each keyword.

The Conversations page showing all tracked searches

If you want to take things up a notch, you can use AI-based matching to get even more precise results. Just open one of your tracked searches and click the gear icon (⚙️) to set it up.

With AI-based matching, you can fine-tune exactly what kind of results you want to see by setting specific criteria. You can also filter out the types of results you’re not interested in, so your feed stays focused and relevant.

The AI-based matching criteria in action

5. Make It a Routine

One unique thing about social listening compared to most other customer acquisition channels is that it requires YOU to be there and interact with your audience. Although this could be a turn-off for larger companies that just want to put money in the marketing machine and get customers, I would argue that this “intimate relationship” with your audience is a great thing for earlier-stage founders.

However, this doesn't mean that you need to spend your whole day doing it. If you check your GummySearch conversations page, you'll quickly see the new conversations that match your searches, evaluate which ones you should comment on, and go drop your comment on the Reddit post. It doesn't need to take more than 10 minutes a day.

I take 10 minutes at the start and end of my day to check in on about 20 tracked keywords and respond to the appropriate matching conversations. This efficient process works wonders for me.

I get hundreds of high-intent visitors a week to my website. The links I drop get indexed by Google. I learn about my target customer with every post I read. I receive thank you's and upvotes from the community on my comments. Not bad for a 20-minute investment, right?

GummySearch is a product born from a process. I built it to make this process available to other early-stage founders. I hope that you can find as much success with it as I have.

So, Which Keywords Should You Track?

The most important question is that, and it’ll also depend on your business and the stage you’re currently in.

Here are the high-level categories of keywords:

Product Category
Customer Objectives
Customer Pain-Points
Your Brand Name
Competitor Names
Blog Post Topics

The number of keywords you decide to track is up to you. I track about 20 per website where social listening is in the marketing strategy.

It's critical to keep your tracked keywords up to date. Make sure to add to your original list, but don't be afraid to remove a keyword if it's not getting you the results you're looking for. Your keyword list isn't static. As your business grows, make sure to update it to reflect new products, services, or industry trends.

For an in-depth dive into each keyword (with examples), please read my “Keywords to track on Reddit” article.

Tips on Mentioning Your Product & Business

You probably know one thing about Reddit: folks on the platform don’t like blatant self-promotion. So, when you’re linking to your website or suggesting your product, the way that you do it determines if you get tons of website traffic and potential customers, or get downvoted into oblivion.

Here's what works for me:

Don't be lazy: Write a thoughtful response, and don't just drop your link. Remember that folks posting on Reddit are often asking their community for help, so give it! Be kind, and you'll be rewarded.
Add value directly: A great working formula for leaving a comment on Reddit is writing a short paragraph answering all/some of the OP's submissions, and then linking to your website for additional context. Not everyone will click, but you want to make sure that even just your text response is something others would upvote.
Plug something free: Although product plugs also work, you'll get called out for self-promotion much less if you are linking to a blog post or a free trial of your product. If your website content is good, these visitors end up trusting you and some will convert to paying customers.
Don't copy and paste: It's easy to just have the same canned response to several submissions on Reddit, but people will notice. Click on your Reddit profile and see your activity, this is what others will see. Make sure that it's varied and doesn't look spammy.
Anchor links matter: This isn't related to the community accepting you, but matters for SEO. Because Google indexes Reddit posts and their top comments, if there are keywords you'd like your pages to be ranked for, make those keywords the anchor text for your links.

Go Forth and Conquer Social Listening

So that's the Reddit social listening playbook! It's a fantastic one for those looking to find their first several hundred customers without a high budget or a big team.

Although I’ve talked about “plugging” a lot in this article, social listening goes far beyond plug-and-play. It takes consistency. Use GummySearch to track interactions driving traffic or engagement to your business. Use Google Analytics to monitor metrics like traffic driven from Reddit, engagement on your comments, and conversions.

The rest is up to you! Go set up your tracked keywords and land those new customers!

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