How to Track Reddit Mentions? [2024]

In just 20 days, the GoPro brand got over 1000 Reddit mentions that reached over 16 million people. That’s how powerful this social platform is. Are you ready to know how to track Reddit mentions effectively and grow?

Reddit mention means a situation when a user, topic, or keyword is referenced in a post or comment on the Reddit platform. It can involve direct tagging or indirect discussion related to the subject.

Gone are the days when Reddit was an avant-garde, non-mainstream social media platform. Yet, many users, even those who visit it daily, still don’t fully utilize the site’s business & PR potential.

Since you’re reading this article, I am sure you’re ready to delve deeper into that topic. 

So, without further ado, let’s dive into the world of Reddit mentions!

Table of contents:

• What are Reddit mentions?
• How to track Reddit mentions?
  • Manual tracking
  • Using a social media monitoring tool
• Conclusion

What are Reddit mentions?

Simply speaking, Reddit mention happens when someone includes a keyword you’re interested in within any content posted on Reddit.

The important thing is that Reddit includes only two types of tagged mentions (so mentions that trigger notifications for someone, e.g. Reddit users):

1. User mentions, where individuals are tagged with the ‘u/’ prefix followed by their username (u/RedditUserName)
2. Subreddit mentions, where specific subreddits are referenced using the ‘r/’ prefix followed by the subreddit name (r/SubredditName).

All the other Reddit mentions are untagged. 

It means that Reddit won’t notify you when someone mentions your brand, the keyword you’re interested in, or the topic you want to follow.

Okay, but why should you even bother? 

Well, there are numerous benefits of tracking mentions on Reddit:

• Sentiment Analysis: With over 70 million daily active users, Reddit is a source of information you shouldn’t disregard. Redditors exchange various thoughts and opinions. Very likely regarding your brand, too!
  
  Tracking your brand mentions on Reddit gives you a broader picture of the sentiment towards you. Thus, you can make more accurate business & PR decisions.
  
  
• Market Research: Reddit is quite hostile towards advertising, and most undercover marketing actions are quickly disclosed (and banned). That’s why its users perceive the platform as a more trustworthy source of information than regular search engines.
  
  Therefore, tracking Reddit mentions provides honest insights into your brand, niche, industry trends, competitors, and potential customers’ pains & expectations.
  
  
• PR Crisis Management: In 2021, a group of Reddit users from the r/wallstreetbets community banded together to buy shares of GameStop. That caused a massive short squeeze that disrupted traditional stock market dynamics and brought losses to some hedge funds.
  
  That’s why disregarding the power of Reddit is not wise. And confirmation that tracking Reddit mentions might be crucial to prevent crises or manage them if they occur.

These are just some examples of why monitoring Reddit mentions is essential. Now, let’s explore how to track Reddit discussions to keep tabs on specific keywords or topics.

How to track Reddit mentions?

In general, you can track Reddit mentions in two ways: manually or by using social listening tools.

01 Manual tracking

Reddit does not offer any native analytics. Therefore, when looking for mentions without an external tool’s help, you literally have to do it manually.

Visit the Reddit platform and type the desired mention (keyword) in the search bar. 

You’ll see all the results grouped into four categories: posts, communities, comments, and people. 

With a simple filter, you can sort results by new, top, and most relevant.

Remember: all the search results come from public and restricted subreddits only. You can’t see mentions posted on private subreddits.

The only type of Reddit mention supported by some basic features is your username mention. Namely, you can receive in-app & email notifications each time someone mentions you on Reddit.

To set it up, go to Settings and visit the Notifications tab. You can check if the option “Mentions u/username” is marked (it should be by default). If not, just change it.

Next, you can set up email notifications when your username is mentioned. Go to the next tab (Emails), find “Username mentions”, and mark it as active.

And that’s pretty it. There is no built-in feature allowing you to monitor other types of Reddit mentions.

You can support those efforts by setting up a Google Alert.

Go to google.com/alerts and insert the keyword you want to track alongside the operator “site”reddit.com”. That’s how you’ll limit alerts only to Reddit mentions.

Use options to define how frequently you would like to get mention alerts, the language, regions, the type of results (all vs. the best), and the email address.

I know that’s a time-consuming method. But it allows you to track mentions more effectively than just through Reddit itself.

Thankfully, there is a much more pleasant and effective way to track (and even analyze!) Reddit mentions. You need a social media monitoring tool.

02 Using a social media monitoring tool

A social media monitoring tool is software used to monitor and analyze online conversations and trends across various social media platforms. 

The real power of social media monitoring tools lies in their ability to track tagged and untagged mentions.

The best social listening tools allow you to track, collect & analyze any type of keyword. 

They also provide helpful mention & hashtag analysis features. Moreover, the top tools support your holistic social media & PR strategy by monitoring multiple social platforms.

For example, Brand24 is a social listening tool that monitors mentions from Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X (Twitter), TikTok, LinkedIn, Telegram, Quora, Twitch, and sources outside social media platforms.

Below, you can see the view of Brand24’s Mentions tab. It presents GoPro brand mentions’ volume & reach evaluations over time. You can easily apply filters to see only these mentions that were published on Reddit.

You can switch the view to the Sentiment chart. It shows the distribution of positive and negative mentions from a given period. The process of determining emotions behind each mention is called sentiment analysis.

Another thing that distinguishes Brand24 from other social media monitoring tools is its Anomaly Detector.

This AI-driven feature automatically identifies unusual changes in your project (like sudden spikes and drops on the chart) and scans the web to uncover what caused those anomalies. It streamlines the media monitoring process.

As you can see in the example below, the significant spike in GoPro mentions was caused by adventurous videos published on TikTok and YouTube.

The Anomaly Detector automatically identified three Tiktokers that brought the most extensive reach. 

From a holistic social media strategy perspective, it might be a nice opportunity to start a collaboration with them.

I always like to check the Compare Periods tab when analyzing Reddit mentions.

This feature benchmarks your brand’s performance with the previous period. It enables you to conclude whether your actions are effective (or not), and if the general sentiment towards you is improving (or not).

I compared GoPro’s two-week performance with the previous 14 days. As you can see, there is progress in virtually every aspect. Keep it up, GoPro!

Benefits of tracking mentions using an advanced Reddit monitoring tool:

• Tracking all the public Reddit mentions with one tool
• Deep-down insights into your Reddit mentions’ volume & reach
• Recognizing the Redditors’ sentiment toward your brand
• Understanding the evaluations among your mentions volume, reach & sentiment thanks to AI solutions
• Ability to identify a potential brand reputation crisis and counteract it

Conclusion

Reddit is a social media platform with a significant, powerful, and engaged community. Knowing and understanding what Redditors think about you and your brand might influence your brand awareness & overall PR.

But tracking Reddit mentions is challenging. 

The platform doesn’t provide native tracking & analytics solutions. 

For that reason, if you want to keep an eye on Reddit mentions, you have two options: manual tracking or using a social media monitoring tool.

Manual tracking supported by Google Alerts can help you track Reddit mentions. However, it’s time-consuming and inefficient way. It might be enough for tiny brands, but more is needed for players gathering hundreds or thousands of monthly mentions.

For such brands, using social listening software is not optional – it’s essential! 

Tools like Brand24 not only track Reddit mentions but also provide detailed analytics regarding brand sentiment, performance, and more.

Final thoughts:

• By tracking Reddit mentions, you can discover valuable information regarding your business, i.e., opinions about your brand, user sentiment towards you, industry trends, etc.
• Reddit provides very poor mention tracking features. 
• Tracking Reddit mentions manually is possible but takes a lot of time and effort.
• Professional social media monitoring tools track both tagged & untagged Reddit mentions. It allows you to perform sentiment analysis, benchmark your performance, and analyze your brand mentions.

Track your Reddit mentions effortlessly & effectively! Start a 14-day free trial!