In the last Part I talked about how once we’ve found our sources we can filter to find the best content.

We talked specifically about filtering by Top to get the most popular content. The premise here is that content that is popular on a specific subreddit will also be popular when we take it to another platform.

I also touched on the Time scale filter: we could look at Top content from Today, This Week, This Month, This Year or All Time.

Today we look at short term content and using a method called newsjacking.

Let’s get started

Newsjacking

If you’ve followed my work you’ll know I’ve covered newsjacking for short video before - in fact it has a whole Playbook here: short form video marketing.

We’ll be talking about pairing this method specifically with Reddit.

Newsjacking is when we hop on board something that is trending and leverage that existing attention to build an audience.

It’s a great top of funnel technique. It’s about broad, mass appal to a large number of audience members outside of your existing audience.

This sort of content will have the best chance to go “viral” (more on this shortly) but won’t necessarily build deep relationships with your audience. For that we’ll use another technique in the next Part.

Finding newsjacking content

The basic method here is simply to use Top and Today or This Week as your filter in the chosen subreddits. That’s the core.

Whether you use Today or This Week depends on how fast your niche moves. In my niche of AI for example everything moves very fast so I tend to use daily.

Try both Today and This Week in the various subreddits you have found to see what comes up with the best results for you.

If you are lucky you may also find posts like this

This is a news summary post, complete with links to the original source. Very handy.

We are looking for the content with the most votes and comments. Remember that this means the topic is already popular with people interested in our niche.

Once you have found a potential post we’ll prepare content on the topic. We’ll be preparing a short video on the topic because i) it’s the most powerful format for building an audience ii) it’s fast and iii) it’s genuinely valuable to convert from a written Reddit post to video to get it to a new audience.

In the last Part of this guide I’ll talk about other formats: namely text for Twitter and LinkedIn posts.

Script for your content

Let’s generate a quick and dirty script for your content piece. Use this prompt to get started:

Act as a social media marketing script writer

Prepare a 30 second short video script about this topic I'll provide.

Start with a powerful attention grabbing hook in the first sentence
Summarise the basic information 

Here is the topic information:
[copy/paste core information]

Review these comments for the most popular/controversial and integrate them into the script in your own voice.
[comments]

Do not give stage directions or B-roll. Just the text of the script. 

Here’s how to use it this prompt. It has two main sections where we want to add information.

The first is the core content. This could be the post itself. Or it could be an article or other source that has been referenced.

For example in this post a link is given

For this post I would go to the original article at The Verge and copy and paste the original article content into my prompt.

I can use that alone to create a script.

Or I can also feed in comments from Reddit to add some spice to my script.

For example here is a great relevant observation

To add in the comments copy them all from Reddit and paste them at the bottom of your prompt. This will get ChatGPT to pull some top comments and adapt them into your script.

When put together here’s a basic script

This script combines the core information from the original article along with some content from top comments. So we’re doubling down on what’s already popular - popular content, popular comments.

This script should just be a starting point. Personally I like to talk off the cuff so I’d want something a lot less wordy.

I’d use an additional prompt like

Give me the bullet points so I can deliver the content easily

This gives me a more easy to scan script

The best format will depend on your personal preferences and how you are recording and delivering so make sure you experiment.

Filming your content

As an expert in your niche my personal recommendation is that you just deliver the content, straight to camera, in as few cuts as possible.

This is a skill that can be learned. And the authenticity of going straight to camera without edits does very well on social media. Better than highly polished content which people trust less.

Apps like Tiktok and Instagram have great recording interfaces that allow you to record section by section. You hold the button to record, release it to stop. Then you can delete the take (if it was bad) or move to the next segment just by holding record and going again. The app will stitch everything together into a full video for you - it’s very useful if you aren’t confident doing one take.

Check the Playbook I mentioned above for more details as obviously video production is a large topic!

Greenscreen

For newsjacking in particular greenscreen is really handy.

The basic idea is you get the original article behind your talking head.

Here is an example

View referenced TikTok post

Notice how I put the article, graphics and tweet behind me as I discuss the content. This adds some additional visual interest for engagement and makes it much easier to talk about things like graphs (rather than describing them!!).

Both Instagram and Tiktok have greenscreen Effects built in. More details in the Playbook I mentioned or simply google “greenscreen tiktok” or your platform of choice to get instructions.

You don’t want to go viral

The purpose of our newsjacking posts is to build an audience. To do this we need to get in front of new viewers. We want to go wide.

The Reddit Strategy helps us do that by helping us find trending topics in our niche and quickly converting them to video.

A word of warning here. Going viral can actually kill your account.

Sounds wild but hear me out.

Let’s imagine you see a piece of content that has wider appeal than your target audience (your potential customers) and you decide to use it.

You put together a quick video, go to bed and forget about it.

Next morning you hop on to see how everything is going. 1 million views. 10,000 new followers. OMG.

Amazing right? Absolutely - it’s a ride. My first video that went to 3M+ felt like a weird dream. I kept checking it and it kept going up. Totally bizarre.

Madison Square Gardens has a capacity of 20,000. So 3M views is the capacity of Madison Square Gardens x150. Nuts.

I won’t lie. It feels great!

But there’s a risk!

If your video topic is wider than your specific topic then you may end up with lots of audience members who are not into your niche. They were interested in the video yes but it was unrepresentative of your normal content.

Suddenly you end up with 10,000 extra followers who are not interested in your core content.

Why’s that bad? Well - the way many social media algorithms work is to show your content to your existing followers first and see how they like it. If they love the content the algo will go wider and start showing the content to more and more strangers.

The risk? You’ve got a whole bunch of followers who will not engage with your core content. They’ll murder it with low engagement and your reach will decrease.

For this reason do not heed the siren call of unrelated highly viral content like funny videos, cute cats and the like. Yes it’ll get views. Yes it’ll get follows. But it will also stop your account from doing what we’re here for: driving business!

Keep prompting,

Kyle