ICYMI: 2026 is the year you crack Reddit
From ads and AMAs to gifting and community support — how brands can meaningfully join the platform
[Dove r/eal Reviews campaign on TikTok]
Note, I’ll be back on Monday with a special report on social media for library teams — coinciding with the end of National Library Week and what Vogue is calling the era of the bookish influencer 📚
⏰ 1-SECOND SUMMARY
Instagram’s testing a new app called Instants — but it’s not available in the US
Threads announced a new Live Chat feature centered around cultural events
YouTube announced a deepfake detection tool for high-profile personalities
Google and Gucci partner for luxury smart glasses
TikTok and Visa to offering a debit card in the UK with creator-friendly perks
Snapchat will highlight the most frequent visitors to a place on Snap Map
LinkedIn is testing a product that lets you compare AI tools side-by-side
How brands such as United, Dove, Fidelity, and Philadelphia Cream Cheese are using Reddit — plus, tips from a Reddit moderator on what to avoid
💻 ROADMAP
📲 YouTube - Google Updates
YouTube developed a proprietary deepfake detection tool that actors, athletes, creators and musicians can use to identify and request removal of deepfakes on the platform.
Google and Gucci have partnered to develop the upcoming Gucci AI smart glasses, targeting a 2027 release date.
Related YouTube News
📲 Meta Updates
Threads announced Live Chats — public group chats around BIG cultural events starting with the NBA playoffs. As of right now, Live Chats will be available to a select group of creators, including Community Champions who are actively engaged in a Threads community. Keep an eye on this one, the opportunity to plan chats around fandoms, interests and cultural moments seems huge.
Threads has now incorporated trends into the search page and the For You feed for U.S. users.
Spotted: People in Europe and the UK are able to download a new app from Instagram called Instants. The Google Play store description says you’re able to: Share disappearing photos with friends — much like Snapchat or BeReal.
Instagram Edits celebrated its one-year anniversary by announcing some upcoming upgrades to captions, advanced color adjustments, speed curves, and more. They’re also working to make tools within the app more customizable.
Spotted: Instagram is testing new insights that reveal specific metrics affecting your views, including Skip rate, Share rate and Repost rate.
Meta announced that parents will be able what topics their teens have asked Meta AI about.
Meta is upgrading its user Account Center to gather all of your accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads, etc.) under a new Meta Account hub. You can optionally set up a single password to log into your apps and devices so you no longer have to remember multiple passwords.
Related Meta News
📲 TikTok Updates
TikTok and Visa partnered in the UK to launch a debit card that offers creator-friendly perks.
TikTok announced its music discovery feature Add to Music App has been used to save more than 6 billion tracks to premium music streaming services over the last twelve months.
Related TikTok News
📲 LinkedIn Updates
LinkedIn is testing a new product called Crosscheck that lets Premium users compare AI tools side-by-side.
📲 Snapchat Updates
Snapchat announced Place Loyalty — highlighting when you’re among the top 25% of Snapchatters who visit that place on Snap Map over the past year.
📲 X Updates
X is shutting down Communities because of low usage and spam and will instead focus on its messaging service, XChat.
X is rolling out a tool to snooze topics you don’t want to see on your For You tab.
📲 Beehiiv Updates
Beehiiv newsletter platform is rolling out upgrades to round out its content offerings, including webinars, podcast support and paid subscriptions.
📲 Substack Updates
Substack newsletter platform launched new translation features, starting with the ability to translate Notes written in English into 15 languages, or into English from over 100 languages.
7️⃣ THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT REDDIT
For a long time, brand roles on Reddit fell into predictable buckets — AMAs, ads, and social listening. The message to brands was simple: stay in your lane.
That’s changing, for a few reasons.
First, Reddit itself. In 2024, the platform launched Reddit Pro, a free suite of tools that welcomed businesses wanting to build an organic presence — tracking conversations, analyzing performance, and engaging with communities.
In 2025, it added Reddit Pro Trends, which surfaces what people are saying about virtually any topic on the platform. And this year, Reddit announced it was testing a new AI-powered shopping feature that turns community recommendations into shoppable carousels.
Then there’s the AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) of it all. Reddit signed content licensing deals with Google and OpenAI early on, plus its reputation as the internet’s largest community forum — home to genuine conversations on everything from vintage cameras to skincare to NYC influencers — has made it one of the most trusted sources for LLMs to pull from, despite some early missteps.
Today, Reddit is among the most-cited sources across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and beyond. That’s prompted brands who’d never considered the platform to take a second look.
Finally, brands themselves are choosing to show up in all new ways. For example, Philadelphia Cream Cheese turned an organic conversation about chives into a two-week paid media campaign. And Fidelity shows up daily to its official subreddit to host community conversations about investing.
Keep reading for a closer look:
How brands such as United, Dove, Fidelity, and Philadelphia Cream Cheese are using the platform
A mini Q&A with Reddit’s comms team
4 tips from a Reddit mod on what to avoid
The 101 on organic engagement
BRANDS ON REDDIT
✈️ United Airlines Uses Reddit to Surface Bigger Stories
United Airlines‘ most compelling use of Reddit isn’t about posting — it’s about listening to gain valuable insight and feedback.
The airline is still in the early stages of building an active Reddit presence. “We are easing in with the goal of testing what works and studying how other brands are winning,” United’s Emily Snyder, Sr. Manager of Social Media told me.
Already, the United social team has had some early wins in surfacing human stories that a brand brief might struggle to duplicate. A good example of this is when United’s team came across a post from a father whose son had lost his Pokémon card binder. Rather than leaving a sympathetic comment and moving on, the team decided to share the story internally, and employees around the world responded, ultimately donating more than 17,000 Pokémon cards to replace what the boy had lost.
“What started as a single social post turned into a global employee-driven effort to create a moment Reid and his family will never forget,” said Snyder.
When United shared the reunion on social media, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive with comments like, “This is how you do corporate right,” according to Snyder. “There’s a real halo effect when people see a brand go above and beyond for one customer, it builds trust that you’d do the same for others.”
Her advice for brands that want to incorporate Reddit into their social strategies? Just start. “The pressure to be ultra-active as a brand on Reddit is low. Just start and see what opportunities you find,” she advised, pointing to one of the airlines’ more unserious posts, Crumb Scene Investigation, as a grassroots way to celebrate United’s 100th anniversary.
🙂🙃 Dove’s Reddit-Powered “r/eal Reviews” Campaign
Unilever‘s Dove brand turned an unlikely corner of the internet into a marketing goldmine by tapping Reddit for unfiltered consumer opinions — including the unflattering ones.
The campaign began when Dove’s team — in collaboration with DAVID London alongside AKQA Paris and WPP Media — discovered that real women were organically praising the brand’s new hair mask on Reddit, completely unprompted.
As Katheleen Dunlop, CMO of Beauty and Wellbeing at Unilever North America, put it: “It’s the real women of Reddit giving their real women testimonials in a completely brandless space.”
Instead of amplifying only the praise, Dove decided to lean into the full spectrum of feedback — pulling 50 reviews, both positive and negative, and plastering them across New York City bus shelters and billboards.
Alongside the glowing endorsements were honest critiques like “Makes my hair feel amazing, but smells hella bad.” The ads kept Reddit’s raw comments and invited passersby to weigh in with the prompt: “Hit or miss. What do you think?”
To emphasize the connection to Reddit, Dove also overlaid the platform’s “Snoo-vatar” mascot over the faces of real women who agreed to be filmed sharing their reviews — an unusual creative choice for a brand whose identity has long been built around showcasing real faces.
The decision to keep the negative reviews — and reinforce the connection to Reddit’s honest conversations — was deliberate. Dunlop explained that authenticity is a core brand asset for Dove. “It wouldn’t feel real if it were only positive and there’d be no tension, right?”
💵 Fidelity’s Community-First Approach on Reddit
While most financial institutions treat social media as a broadcast channel, Fidelity Investments took a notably different path on Reddit.
The financial services company launched an official subreddit, r/fidelityinvestments, as a community hub. It coexists on Reddit alongside unofficial fan communities like r/Fidelity, something that would be unthinkable on platforms where brand ownership of a name is fiercely guarded.
The roots of Fidelity’s Reddit engagement run surprisingly deep. In 2021, the firm hosted a live AMA (Ask Me Anything) on r/IAmA, Reddit’s dedicated forum for interactive Q&As. The session attracted more than 1,300 comments. “Fidelity regularly engages with customers where they are to answer questions and gather feedback,” the company said at the time.
A year later, the Wall Street Journal reported that CEO Abigail Johnson — granddaughter of the firm’s founder — was checking the pulse of the investing world through Reddit’s stock-picking forums, suggesting the platform’s influence at Fidelity went well beyond the marketing department.
Now, the company hosts its own subreddit, describing it as a place where people can get answers about Fidelity’s products and services and engage with the community through conversations around trading, current events, crypto and more.
Read More: What Dove, Netflix, and Nike didn’t do on Reddit is why they’re winning
STRAIGHT FROM REDDIT
I spoke with a Reddit spokesperson about how brands can approach the platform.
ICYMI: Social teams don’t always know how to get started on the platform. Using Reddit personally is very different from using it as a brand, so please explain it to us like we know nothing?
“Yeah, let’s jump right into it. So Reddit is for everyone. There’s 100,000+ communities on Reddit, from niche things like old cameras for specific types of photography, down to really broad local ones, like r/Sydney in Australia. Some people have a misconception about who is on Reddit or what Reddit is for, but once they start down that rabbit hole, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t realize I can get recommendations on skincare, or makeup, or petite clothing.”
ICYMI: For marketers, what sets Reddit apart from other platforms?
“Our feeds are not based on an algorithm. It’s really determined by the humans that are on Reddit. That’s all the community, voting up what they believe is most relevant and valuable for the community, and then what’s not, what’s irrelevant, or doesn’t fit the community.”
ICYMI: What is the primary user behavior of somebody who’s coming to Reddit?
“It’s very balanced. I mean, there are definitely people who are coming on to Reddit daily, and they’re going on to their feeds, and they’re seeing all the different subs that they’re subscribed to, and then going deeper into those. And then there are the ones who are looking for more one-off conversations of something super, super niche. They may start on Google, because they don’t know where to find that on Reddit. So I would say it really depends.”
ICYMI: Can you share an example of a brand on Reddit?
“This is a funny one. There was a sous chef that went on and wanted Reddit to critique how well he chopped chives. He said he was gonna post every day until Reddit said his chive chopping was perfect. Philly Cream Cheese came in and brought up this organic conversation on Reddit and made it into a campaign, which was really fun. I think they also sent him some knives. And he posted that back on the subreddit and brought it back to life. It was just fun to see a brand participating in something very Reddit-y and kind of quirky on the platform. And they got a lot of traction for participating in it.”
ICYMI: There’s a lot of interest in AI search results and how Reddit is driving those. Is that something you think about?
“It is something that we’re seeing a lot of clients lean into, but it’s necessarily something we’re pushing. We don’t want people to come on to Reddit just for the sake of showing up to LLMs. That’s not what this is for. We really want it to be about our communities. Iif your brand is being talked about a lot on Reddit — if you are the most talked about face wash — then you probably will surface. From our point of view, it’s a benefit, but it’’s not something we can control.”
THE MODERATOR POV
TheYellowRose, a longtime moderator of some of Reddit’s most active communities, including r/curlyhair and r/Naturalhair, shared what they wants brands to know.
Their biggest piece of advice? Show up as a person, not a brand. “There is a certain brand that is very popular on Reddit because an employee would just chime in candidly from time to time on topics that had little to nothing to do with their website,” they told me. “She was just a person most of the time, and people really appreciated that she didn’t sound like a spokesperson or a corporate mouthpiece.”
Other tips they shared include:
Be human when things go wrong
Redditors will ask hard questions — especially when something’s gone sideways. “If the brand comes off as too safe, too corporate, and not truthful enough, redditors will reject that. People on reddit really value the truth and getting to the bottom of things. Know when to stop responding though! Some people will accept your answers and others will keep digging just to be antagonistic, you need to be able to discern trolls from genuinely curious users.”
Read the rules before you post
Every subreddit has its own culture and guidelines — and moderators enforce them. “I have banned so many brands from /r/curlyhair because we reject all forms of self-promotion. If they had come to be helpful or to add value to the subreddit, they wouldn’t have been banned. We would love for brands to come talk about issues with their products, provide advice on proper use of the products, tell us about upcoming sales or coupons so we can buy at the right times, but we do not appreciate in-your-face ads.”
Know your reputation before you show up
Before engaging in a subreddit, TheYellowRose recommends doing your homework.
“Some brands are really disliked and have no trust amongst the userbase and will receive abuse/tough questions/straight up hate just for showing up, even with good intentions.”
REDDIT 101
🎯 Communities (subreddits or r/) are what users subscribe to based on their interests the basics
📢 Moderators run each community and enforce their specific community rules (that everyone, including businesses, follow)
👥 Users (redditors) contribute via posts (as “OP”) or comments – most users are anonymous which is why Reddit conversations are so honest
👆🏻 Voting determines visibility – upvotes push content up and downvotes lower it
🏠 The Home Feed displays posts from the communities that a user has joined and recommended posts, meaning users see an interest-based feed
Read More: Reddit Pro’s Guide to Organic Engagement for Businesses on Reddit
👀 ICYMI: JUST THE HEADLINES
Roblox is taking over Las Vegas Friday, streaming a Creator Showdown across YouTube, TikTok, Twitch and their own platform - Roblox
If comments are the new frontline, how is your brand showing up? - Adweek
Who is John Ternus, the new CEO of Apple? - Morning Brew
Duolingo dials back its ‘unhinged’ marketing - Business Insider
Clues you’re using AI aren’t just em-dashes, it's a tell-tale sentence construction - TechCrunch
These marketing leaders were asked how they’d spend an extra $1M — their answers reveal where social is headed - Inc
Why do you think Instagram would play around with creating another app dedicated to disappearing stories when that functionality already exists within Insta itself?
Adding a comment here from Alex D. on LinkedIn:
As a mod for r/Worldnews and r/News, big YES to the three tips Rose shared. I'd also a #4 - Reach out to the moderator team and introduce yourself! The difference between a ban for spamming and a warning is the mods knowing your intentions behind the post.