The Markup dives into Reddit threads

Skye Lucas is a 2024 RJI Student Innovation Fellow partnered with The Markup, which has since merged with CalMatters. The RJI Student Fellows will be sharing their innovative work throughout the summer in Innovation in Focus.

Previously, we ran a small experiment aimed at highlighting The Markup’s impact-driven reporting by engaging with users in the comments section of TikTok. The strategy was less about driving clicks and more about getting information from our journalists into TikTok users’ hands.  

To continue broadening The Markup’s reach, we turned to other social media platforms like Reddit and built upon our nontraditional social engagement strategy.

For our less-resourced nonprofit newsroom and others like it, there is less flexibility to invest the time, energy and people required to create high quality production TikToks. Likewise, creating and nurturing our own community on Reddit is too much work for too little benefit. So, we designed a strategy that involved commenting on other people’s posts or subreddits and replying to other users’ comments. 

Preparing the story’s launch

This time we devised the engagement strategy to accompany The Markup’s latest investigation: Michigan’s “Fair and Reasonable” Reforms Allowed Car Insurers to Charge More in Black Neighborhoods. In its main investigation The Markup and Outlier Media dug through tens of thousands of pages of documents insurers filed with regulators. The newsrooms found that every major insurance company in Michigan charged higher prices in places where more Black people lived–especially in Detroit.

We looked for TikToks and subreddits with activity no older than six months old. To refine our search, we used date filters on the social media app and opted for recent subreddits, comments and posts by relying on corresponding time stamps. Besides recency, we also entered key terms and phrases into the search bar to identify relevant posts. 

The insurance story investigated inequitable insurance pricing in Detroit and Michigan, so terms like “car insurance,” “insurance help,” “Detroit,” and “Michigan” were used in searches across all platforms. Within subreddits we searched for posts that included the words “insurance” or “Detroit.”

From the search results, we then selected videos and subreddits with at least a few comments because the newsroom’s account was more likely to be spotted by other users in a engaged comment section. Since our focus was the comment section, we did not consider other metrics such as likes and view count.

Tailoring our tone

For this investigation, we drafted a variety of comments tailored to each platform. To be authentic, we sought to strike a balance between playing an informative role without forced self-promotion. For example, on subreddits where users posed general questions about moving to the Detroit area, we recommended they survey how the auto insurance rates vary according to the various neighborhoods they were interested in. 

Similarly on TikTok we found plenty of users complaining about sky-high insurance rates, to which we sympathized with that sentiment and offered advice. 

We also identified a TikTok user whose profile was dedicated to various insurance Q+As. In this instance, we initiated a conversation with the content creator by sharing the following information. 

Future strategies

If a newsroom wants to orchestrate an alternative social engagement plan that accommodates a low lift approach through high yielding posts, here are a couple key tips from what we learned along the way. 

• In addition to identifying subreddits with key search terms, do a domain search on Reddit. This way you can search for your newsroom’s stories that others have posted. Those subreddits are likely a positive site to initiate engagement. In our case, this would look like: https://www.reddit.com/domain/themarkup.org/. With a domain search you can see all posts where users have linked a story from your newsroom alongside which subreddit it was posted to and which user posted the story. You also have the ability to comment on that user’s post instantly. 
• In Subreddits, it does not hurt to send the mods (moderator) a message saying that you don’t want to spam, and you want to add value to the conversation when possible, and include how you plan to participate. 

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Cite this article

Lucas, Skye (2024, Aug. 15). An alternative strategy for social engagement. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/an-alternative-strategy-for-social-engagement/