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8 Big Reddit Trends Brands & Marketers Must Know
When Duolingo noticed Redditors raving about its passive-aggressive owl memes, it didn't just lurk; it leaned in, inspiring other brands to do the same.
They doubled down on self-aware humor and amplified the Reddit-inspired content across channels. As a result, Duolingo saw a spike in app downloads and social mentions.
This is one of many cases where brands gain insights from Reddit and act on them. With 1.22 billion users and rising ad revenue, Reddit is a giant for consumer insights and early trends, thanks to its active communities and strong moderation.
What are 2025's top Reddit trends? How can you use them for product validation, trend-driven campaigns, AI SEO, and rapid brand response? The potential is vast — learn more here.
- Reddit's strategic relevance for brands in 2025: Why it still matters
- Top 10 Reddit trends that brands and marketers must know in 2025
- Driving authentic brand engagement on Reddit: What works in 2025
- Real-world examples of Reddit Trends
- Use Reddit trends to fuel targeted, high-converting campaigns with Sprinklr
Reddit's strategic relevance for brands in 2025: Why it still matters
Compared to platforms like X (formerly Twitter) or TikTok, Reddit's clout lies in depth over speed. TikTok drives awareness, and X captures immediacy. Reddit captures intent.
Reddit users arrive with questions, comparisons, or problems. Its structured forums host detailed, high-intent discussions, making it a trusted space for product research, peer reviews, and brand perception.
These aspects set Reddit apart. But there are two recent shifts that are increasing its influence:
1. Surge in AI content that's driving people to seek user-generated content
As AI content spreads online (think ChatGPT-generated posts, Google's AI Overviews, etc), more users turn to Reddit's moderated, community discussions for trustworthy, experience-based answers. In an AI-driven era, Reddit's authenticity shines.
The Google Trends graph below shows a steady rise in interest on Reddit over the past five years, indicating the platform’s growing public favor and importance in the overall search landscape👇
2. The Google–Reddit partnership
In 2024, Google licensed Reddit content, putting more Reddit threads in search results.
Analysts speculate that this move is a result of the demand for authentic content and Google responding to search behaviors where people have been using "Reddit" as a suffix to their queries (e.g., “best electric shaver Reddit").
In 2025, some data suggests 97.5% of SERP results now feature Reddit posts, meaning brands with a strong Reddit presence gain more impressions and discovery opportunities.
Both developments are significantly impacting how people discover content on search engines and on Reddit.
Increasingly, search journeys are starting and ending on Reddit, which is why you should focus on these Reddit trends listed below.
Top 10 Reddit trends that brands and marketers must know in 2025
These 10 trends spotlight how Reddit is influencing product, content, and performance marketing strategies:
1. Using Reddit to glean authentic consumer insights and brand sentiment
People now use forums like Reddit as a core part of pre-purchase research.
Approximately 88% of social users claim that Reddit influences their purchasing decisions, and 76% consider its content more trustworthy than that of other platforms. Moreover:
- Reddit ranks number one for finding solutions and discovering new products through authentic conversations
- Seventy-one percent of people researching brands do so on Reddit, making it a hub for connecting social media, e-commerce, and in-store choices
- Seventy-four percent of users say Reddit helps them decide faster, the highest among social platforms. This rapid decision-making can significantly impact a brand's sales funnel and conversion rates
- Seventy-four percent are satisfied with purchases influenced by Reddit content
Why you should care
Reddit users discuss purchase intent and trade-offs (price vs. longevity, service vs. convenience), providing clear signals for product positioning beyond general product research.
Threads often include detailed pros/cons, use-case stories, and follow-up Q&As that reveal why people buy (or bounce).
The exact phrases users use in posts/comments on Reddit are search engine-friendly — so you can use them to inform copy, FAQs, search keywords, and ad creative.
Subreddits surface emerging product issues or rising brands before they show up in reviews or sales data. Here's an example 👇
New Balance, for example, used Reddit for its UK Fresh Foam launch. It targeted men's running communities with conversation placements, takeovers, and in-feed ads.
The campaign reached casual and serious runners. Ad awareness reportedly rose, beating benchmarks.
With the right social media monitoring platform, you can also use Reddit for real-time user reactions in moments of product failure, crisis, or policy backlash.
You may like: 4 Reasons Reddit is everywhere right now and what it means for you
Unlike other platforms, Reddit users offer detailed breakdowns, timelines, and historical context that can help brands understand the depth and scope of perception gaps.
If you leave the negative comments unaddressed, brand sentiment can spiral, and AI summary tools may surface this unfiltered chatter for months to come.
What can you do?
- Set AI-driven listening workflows to identify patterns across high-signal subreddits (more about it in point six)
- Track recurring topics and sentiment shifts, build a live consumer intelligence layer. Use a social listening platform to monitor relevant Reddit threads for potential crises and issue timely alerts to mitigate them
- Use the details to inform product decisions and campaign timing with real user input
⚡Pro tip: Use Sprinklr Social Listening to detect early complaints about a competitor's feature in subreddits like r/tech or r/SkincareAddiction and many more in one dashboard. Sprinklr has a strategic partnership with Reddit that grants you near real-time access to public threads.
You can isolate high-engagement threads, extract key pain points using Sprinklr AI+, and monitor how fast the conversation is growing, which has a variety of uses, etc.
2. Building marketing and ad campaigns with community input
User-led initiatives on Reddit consistently outperform branded content in credibility and shareability.
Imagine utilizing those insights to inform your product or service campaigns? That's precisely what many brands are doing on Reddit.
AMAs, crowdsourced polls, and product feedback loops drive higher-quality engagement and deeper brand recall, especially in trust-sensitive sectors such as healthcare, finance, and technology.
Not to mention the goldmine of first-hand insights that comes from such efforts on Reddit.
Why you should care
Community-driven inputs reduce creative blind spots while planning campaigns and messaging. You can use them to improve your message-market resonance by incorporating candid audience perspectives.
Moreover, your target audience's direct involvement increases trust, especially among Reddit's ad-skeptical audience.
These engagement points can shorten campaign cycles, reduce reliance on external testing, and increase adoption or amplify earned media.
What can you do?
- Partner with Reddit mods or Reddit-savvy community managers to plan engagement campaigns
- Use comments and thread replies as inspiration for actual copy, taglines, or even product naming (here's an example of a Reddit thread for naming a product 👇)
❓What types of Reddit signals would be most reliable for shaping positioning?
For reliable Reddit signals in shaping positioning, comment volume, and engagement metrics outperform (PDF) sentiment analysis.
Research from the 2025 International Conference on Computational Science analyzing Reddit's r/wallstreetbets found that "simpler metrics, such as the volume of comments and Google search trends, exhibit stronger predictive signals" compared to traditional sentiment analysis.
The study — which examined GameStop and AMC discussions — revealed that social media sentiment showed only weak correlation with actual stock prices, while comment volume provided more reliable positioning signals.
Reddit's upvoting system acts as natural market validation, surfacing resonant content that indicates genuine market interest rather than manufactured hype.
Most effective signals include: upvote patterns on competitor discussions, mention volume trends, and sentiment shift detection speed. These metrics provide early warning indicators weeks before trends appear on other platforms.
Also read: How does your customer really feel? How social listening can help
3. Boosting brand visibility via Reddit's SERP influence and AI overviews
Google increasingly ranks Reddit threads in its top search results and AI summaries, making them influential touchpoints for brand discovery.
Consider Reddit as another critical stakeholder in the regular SEO/organic search optimization.
Gen-AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude are also increasingly citing Reddit as a source of information.
Reddit threads with numerous upvotes and comments can significantly influence decisions, particularly in categories such as software, skincare, and electronics. Here's an example of a Reddit thread ranking high for a search query 👇
Why you should care
If you use SEO (now, also GEO and AEO), your strategy must include Reddit monitoring, response plans, and repurposing thread insights into branded blog or help center content.
Without Reddit visibility, you risk losing discoverability to agile competitors or, worse, critical user complaints.
What should you do?
- Identify the top Reddit threads influencing your top 50 category keywords
- Audit these threads for sentiment, gaps, and misrepresentations
- Collaborate with SEO, PR, and content teams to influence the narrative by participating in the thread and creating original content that ranks higher and addresses the same topic
4. Running ads with privacy-aware, context-sensitive formats
Reddit's ad model prioritizes subtlety, community alignment, and contextual placement.
Formats like Conversation Ads and Community Takeovers work best when ads resemble organic discussion, not overt promotion.
Here's an example of Reddit ads organically mingling with the threads where they show up on👇
Why you should care
Poor targeting or tone-deaf messaging on Reddit quickly triggers downvotes, moderator removals, and brand backlash, erasing months of goodwill.
Community-driven input can help you avoid these pitfalls by revealing how your audience speaks, what they value, and where the red lines are.
This Reddit-specific localization of tone and topic not only prevents missteps but also lifts CTRs, lowers CPA, and builds brand trust, especially in privacy- or community-sensitive sectors.
What can you do?
- Localize ad tone and visual language for each subreddit to see improved response rates and sentiment outcomes
- Start with specific subreddit targeting (r/technology, r/finance, r/skincare, etc.) that aligns with your ICP. Expand to interest plus lookalikes only after you've validated which subs perform
- Use interactive ad formats, such as polls or Q&A-style copy. Redditors value participation — ads that blend in more naturally with the thread
- Write ad copy like Redditors: conversational, text-rich, and informal. Avoid heavy branding; use humor, curiosity, or community lingo
- Start with CPM for top-of-funnel awareness, then retarget site visitors with CPC or CPA bidding. Reddit's pixel plus Conversions API has matured
- Cap frequency and rotate creatives every two to three weeks. Test three variants of ad copy per audience
⚡Pro tip: Use Sprinklr Social Media Publishing platform to manage your Reddit ads end-to-end — creation, cloning, management, targeting, budgeting, creatives, scheduling, and advanced configurations — natively, on the same platform.
Sprinklr supports most Reddit ad features natively:
- Objectives: Brand awareness, traffic, conversions, video views, app installs
- Ad formats: Image, video, text, carousel, and conversation-style ads
- Creative features: Headlines, thumbnails, CTAs, comment enablement, and previews
5. Turning Reddit posts into short-form video content
Reddit-origin content (questions, rants, confessions) often fuels TikTok and YouTube Shorts narratives. Remember Duolingo's case?
Marketers are increasingly transforming Reddit threads into short-form videos to capitalize on virality and increase time spent on the platform across channels.
By aligning Reddit trends with visual-first formats, you can expand reach while keeping messaging rooted in real audience interests.
For example, a running Reddit joke/rumor ("did Michael Cera create CeraVe?") bubbled up for years — e.g., a 2023 thread on r/stupidquestions, and 450 influencers who made it viral, resulting in 15.4B earned impressions before CeraVe capitalized on it.
This conspiracy theory became the hook for CeraVe's Super Bowl reveal with Michael Cera, which led to billions of impressions on the ad. This is an example of a skincare brand and Oglivy New York explicitly leaning on that Reddit-originated myth.
Personalized short-form assets, adapted to regional trends, offer an agile way to test tone and content before larger campaign rollout.
Why you should care
Relevant Reddit threads capture authentic audience language and behavior, fueling content that resonates across platforms.
You can use Reddit content to "crowdsource" storylines, content ideas, and angles, and then plug directly into performance video testing.
Nike's social and product marketing teams frequently track r/running and r/sneakers to identify highly engaging user stories, such as emotional first-marathon recaps, debates over shoe performance, or sneaker unboxing videos.
They tag these posts by emotion (achievement, nostalgia, excitement), product theme (Air Zoom series, sustainability, limited drops), and engagement type (storytelling, review, photo showcase).
These tagged insights are shared with Nike's short-form content teams to create Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts testing hooks.
What should you do?
- Build a cross-functional Reddit content library (e.g., top 100 comments on r/yourcategory)
- Tag by emotion, product theme, and engagement. Assign them to short-form content teams to test narrative hooks
6. Using Reddit insights + AI to personalize campaigns
Reddit threads contain rich emotional cues, objections, unmet needs, and purchase rationales.
AI tools now help structure these signals into actionable creative triggers, segmenting users by language style, concern types, and intent signals.
Why you should care
You can transition from persona-based marketing to Reddit-informed intent models, dynamically adapting copy, offers, and targeting manually or through automation whenever possible.
Instead of serving the same ad set to everyone, AI agents or your team can map a Reddit comment about "price being too high" into a value-focused offer or turn a post celebrating a product win into an upsell opportunity.
This approach enables campaigns to connect with people in the exact emotional and decision-making state they're in — boosting relevance, conversion rates, and customer trust.
What should you do?
- Feed Reddit thread clusters into your AI personalization engine (via embeddings, prompt tuning, or AI agents)
- Use them to auto-generate copy variations, CTAs, or email flows segmented by user concerns or sentiment
⚡Pro tip: Use Sprinklr AI+ to analyze Reddit conversations and glean accurate insights to inform various business outcomes.
Instead of using static ad creatives to broad segments, Sprinklr AI+ can identify signals for you in Reddit conversations — price sensitivity or product enthusiasm — and turn them into insights, which you can use in campaigns.
You can then generate tailored messaging, refine offers, or adjust targeting to match the customer's mindset.
7. Tracking competitor sentiment and early market shifts
The first cracks in a competitor's armor rarely show up in press releases; they usually start in community chatter. Here's an example of a person reviewing a popular electric razor on Reddit 👇
On Reddit, frustrated users share detailed accounts of poor service, buggy updates, or unmet expectations within days.
Spotting these signals early can give you breathing room to act before the story spreads elsewhere.
Why you should care
Reddit can serve as your early "market sensor," providing the edge by connecting small community rumbles before they become industry-wide narratives.
By focusing on Reddit insights, you can use them for proactive GTM moves, such as messaging pivots, competitive landing pages, targeted outreach, or even product tweaks.
What should you do?
1. Look for detailed complaints right after updates (e.g., "new feature broke X"). Track recurring bugs, UX frustrations, or unmet promises
2. Watch for highly upvoted comments that signal disappointment ("I used to love this product, but…"). Early loss of loyalty is a leading indicator
3. Identify posts where users highlight discrepancies between competitor claims and their actual experiences. This exposes positioning cracks
4. Analyze "why I switched" stories for feature gaps, pricing issues, or emotional drivers of churn
5. Don't pitch. Instead, observe, save posts, cluster insights, and use them to: refine messaging, highlight your product's strengths, or fast-track fixes before similar complaints hit you
Know more: Social media automation: How to get it right?
8. Product testing and feature validation through subreddits
Product-specific subreddits, such as r/Notion, r/ClickUp, r/Asana, and r/Trello, are threads where people post bug reports, provide feedback, and report unmet workflow needs within hours of launches.
You can use such targeted subreddits as agile testing environments.
Posting prototypes, feature previews, or mockups in relevant communities can yield direct, constructive feedback within hours, without the cost and delay of formal testing cycles.
Why you should care
Real-time testing on Reddit provides unfiltered, practical feedback, enabling faster iteration cycles than traditional usability testing.
For example, in r/beermoney you can post an early version of a side-hustle app, share screenshots of a new payout feature, or float questions about payment frequency.
Within hours, you'll get blunt (and we mean it), experience-based reactions from people who actively try and compare similar tools.
This lets you validate assumptions, spot friction points, and refine messaging before committing to a large-scale launch.
What should you do?
- Identify three to five high-signal subreddits for your category
- Drop early ideas, feature concepts, or "what if" scenarios into relevant threads (without hard selling) to gauge raw reactions before committing resources
- Gradually, post feature demos or visual prototypes and use comment data to rank and qualify suggestions (e.g., high-karma users, repeated upvotes)
- Track competitor update threads or "what tool should I use" posts, cluster repeated complaints/requests, and test how your positioning or features could directly address those gaps
- Share lightweight content (comparisons, thought-starter questions, or user stories) and watch which phrasing resonates or gets pushback
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Driving authentic brand engagement on Reddit: What works in 2025
Brands that thrive here understand the difference between posting in a community and contributing to it.
What works on Reddit:
- Community-first tone by answering questions, offering insights, or participating in AMAs. This humanizes the brand and builds trust through real-time conversations (example)
- Collaborating with subreddit moderators before posting. It signals respect for the community's boundaries and increases post-approval rates (example)
- Tailoring content to subreddit norms and language. Reddit communities have distinct cultures, and mimicking their style can help you gain legitimacy (example)
- Sharing behind-the-scenes stories or product development journeys. Posts that reveal process, struggle, or internal thinking often spark thoughtful engagement (example)
- Leveraging Reddit polls, flairs, and discussion tags to invite participation. Interactive formats native to Reddit signal that you're here to listen, not just broadcast (example)
What doesn't work on Reddit:
- Copy-pasting ads from other platforms. Redditors quickly downvote anything that looks like it was meant for Instagram or LinkedIn
- Ignoring community rules. Many subreddits have strict guidelines; breaking them, even unintentionally, can get you banned
- Jumping into threads with off-topic promotions. Irrelevant brand replies are seen as tone-deaf and often called out or mocked
- Creating throwaway brand accounts just to push a message. One-off accounts with no post history or karma lack credibility and are often flagged as spam
- Over-engineering viral posts with memes or slang that feel forced. Reddit values wit, but it's quick to reject brands that try too hard to sound like insiders
Real-world examples of Reddit Trends
1. Nintendo
Nintendo participated in AMAs and discussions on gaming subreddits, such as r/NintendoSwitch, often through developer teams or moderators of sponsored threads.
Instead of pushing products, they shared updates, behind-the-scenes decisions, and community shout-outs, encouraging organic buzz around new releases.
2. Audi
Audi's marketing team collaborated with moderators of r/cars and r/AskEngineers to answer technical questions about electric vehicle innovation.
Rather than running flashy ads, they positioned their engineers as experts, contributing thoughtful responses to EV-related threads.
The outcome was enhanced credibility, broader exposure, and positive sentiment among auto enthusiasts.
3. GSK (GlaxoSmithKline)
GSK used Reddit as a listening and engagement tool during health awareness campaigns.
By collaborating with moderators on subreddits like r/AskDocs and r/Health, they hosted AMAs with medical experts to answer public health questions, especially around vaccines and wellness.
They avoided direct product mentions, focusing instead on credible, science-backed information. This built trust and positioned GSK as a responsible voice in health-related conversations.
Read more: How to set social media goals for your business
Use Reddit trends to fuel targeted, high-converting campaigns with Sprinklr
Reddit is now a key channel for uncovering early consumer signals that influence search visibility, brand perception, and buying decisions. These conversations are specific, fast-moving, and often missed by traditional monitoring tools.
To compete in 2025, you need more than passive observation — you need actionable intelligence.
Sprinklr is your one-stop shop to manage your entire Reddit strategy, combining listening, engagement, insights, and advertising on a single platform.
You can identify the exact subreddits where demand begins, track sentiment changes in real-time, and activate responses through coordinated campaigns.
Book a personalized demo of Sprinklr Social to translate Reddit conversations into higher campaign ROI, faster crisis response, improved product-market fit, and stronger customer loyalty.
Frequently Asked Questions
Reddit trends in 2025 offer early insights into consumer behavior and cultural shifts before they hit mainstream. Tapping into top Reddit trends enables enterprises to craft timely and resonant campaigns.
Authentic participation in subreddits — guided by the best Reddit trends — means adding value, not selling. Transparency, relevance, and respect for community norms are key.
Promoted posts, AMAs, and UGC-driven carousel ads top the list of Reddit trends 2025. The best-performing ads mirror top Reddit trends in tone and topic.
Threads related to the top Reddit trends often rank high on Google, thereby boosting visibility and acquiring backlinks. Strategic engagement can enhance long-tail keyword performance.
Yes. Reddit trends often fuel high-performing content on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Repurposing top threads makes storytelling more relatable and real.
