Using Reddit to Level Up Our Ideation Sessions

We’ve heard it time and time again from PR’s that ideation is one of the hardest parts of the process. The biggest challenge? How do we come up with ideas that people actually care about? 

Often, ideation relies upon trend reports, competitor analysis, and social media trends. But those places rarely show us what audiences really think. 

And this is where Reddit can help. 

Unlike platforms like Instagram and TikTok, Reddit isn’t polished or performative. It’s messy, semi-anonymous and unfiltered. People aren’t going onto Reddit to build their personal brand or impress their followers. They go to Reddit to ask questions, vent frustrations, share opinions, and talk honestly about what is happening in their lives right now. 

In other words, Reddit is a live focus group and a direct window into the minds of your audience. As PR’s and marketers, we need to be using this incredibly powerful source to level up our ideation sessions and create ideas that are genuinely going to have an impact on our target audience. 

When you start to explore Reddit conversations, you quickly start to uncover what people care about, what questions they’re asking around your industry, product or service, what frustrations they’re venting and the language they use. 

How Digital PR’s can use Reddit for Ideation?

1: Start with Reddit's built in search 

A simple way to get started is through Reddit's own search bar. If you click in the search bar, before typing anything, you’ll often see a list of trending searches and topics people are currently discussing on the platform or that are based on your interests. 

Using the search bar, you can also search for keywords related to your topic or audience, and then filter results by 

• Hot - popular conversations gaining engagement

• Top - the highest performing posts

• New - new discussions happening 

• Comment Count - posts that have the highest engagement from Reddit users

This quickly helps you identify the conversations that people are actively engaging in. 

When searching on desktop, the right-hand sidebar often brings up relevant communities related to your search, which can help you discover even more conversations. 

2: Explore trending communities 

Down the left-hand side, in the navigation, you can go to Popular - this shows the most popular conversations happening on Reddit right now. Here, you can filter by: 

• Best - Reddit's algorithmically recommended posts based on relevance and engagement

• Hot - is a post that is getting a lot of attention in a small amount of time 

• New - displays the newest posts or comments

• Top - the most highly upvoted posts/comments 

• Rising - a post that is gaining traction and attention 

In most versions of Reddit, you can also filter the popular feed by location. This is a great way to understand the conversations happening in different parts of the world, and helps us as digital PR’s to get into the mind of our international audience. 

3: Use Google to find specific threads 

I’ve heard people say they find it hard to find relevant communities and posts. A way to get around that is to actually get off Reddit… 

Instead, type into Google site:reddit.com [your topic]

This often reveals hyper-relevant, indexed Reddit discussions that are not only relevant to your client, but also show that the subject is relevant, timely and trusted by users, search engines and AI platforms alike. Accessing indexed Reddit threads in this way provides access to the same data that informs AI-powered platforms. 

You can also use question-based searches, such as:

4: Find the right subreddits for your audience 

Reddit is organised into communities called subreddits, each dedicated to a specific topic or interest. If one of your clients is a UK-based housing specialist, you might explore communities such as r/HousingUK. 

You can also use r/findareddit, a dedicated subreddit where users ask for recommendations for communities around specific topics.

5: Don’t ignore the comments 

The real value of Reddit lies within the comment section. Here is where you’ll find long, detailed conversations packed with the natural language people use when discussing problems, experiences and opinions. When exploring the comments, sort by ‘New’ to see the most recent conversations. 

Also, try searching for exact match phrases like “rent increasing UK” and searching for the keyword + subreddit combinations such as “renting r/HousingUK” to find discussions where people are actively talking about the issue.

These discussions often reveal long-tail keywords, niche frustrations, and emerging trends.

6: Look for patterns 

The more you explore Reddit threads, the more you’ll begin to notice recurring patterns in the way people talk about certain topics. Some of the most useful patterns to look out for are:

• Questions 

They reveal search intent. What people are searching for, and what they don’t understand and want to know about. This helps us to create campaigns or draft expert commentary that directly addresses and answers these questions. 

• Discussions 

They help to discover what people actually care about. You can also analyse how people are talking about certain topics and mirror the audience's words in outreach to make it feel even more authentic. 

• Recommendations 

They show commercial intent, highlighting what people are actively looking to buy right now. This allows us to create PR content that aligns with current buying interests or positions our clients' products or services as the solution. 

• Complaints

These often highlight gaps in knowledge or frustrations that we can use within reactives and campaigns. This helps us to create PR content that solves or educates our target audience. 

• Innovations 

They show emerging opportunities and trends we can use in our outreach. Emerging trends often start in small communities before hitting Instagram, TikTok or even news outlets, so this is a powerful tool. 

When you use all of these tactics in combination, Reddit becomes a really powerful tool for understanding your client's target audience, their pain points, their frustrations, but also what they’re interested in, what they want to buy and their knowledge gaps around certain products and services. 

From this research stage, we can turn insights into ideas. If there are gaps in people's knowledge, we can address those gaps by producing expert commentary. If there are patterns in people talking about the buyer's journey when purchasing a home, and how people are getting let down at the last minute, we can look to create a campaign around how often house sales fall through to directly address those frustrations. 

If we want to create impactful campaigns that resonate with our target audience, we need to start where the real conversations are happening. It’s not just a research tool; it’s the blueprint for ideas that connect with real people. 

This post was written by Chloe Meadows, Head of Digital PR at Digitaloft

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