Reddit Brand Monitor

Reddit is where people ask whether your product is worth paying for, and they ask each other rather than you. This agent sweeps the terms and subreddits you name every hour, opens the real hits and reads the comments underneath before deciding anything, then sends whatever clears your bar to Slack while the thread is still climbing. It never posts a word back, because a brand answering through a bot ends up as the screenshot at the top of the thread.

What people use it for

• Arrive while it is rising - A Reddit thread does most of its traffic in the first six hours. Hearing about it inside the hour is the difference between joining the conversation and reading the postmortem.
• Know the sub before speaking - Each message says what that subreddit's rules allow from companies. Nobody walks into a community that removes vendor comments on sight and learns about it from a mod.
• Complaints that skipped support - Plenty of unhappy customers post to Reddit instead of opening a ticket. Those threads reach Slack with the comments quoted, early enough to fix the account before the thread starts outranking your own site.
• Quiet hours stay quiet - Only threads clearing your policy interrupt anybody; passing mentions gather into the end of day roundup. Most sweeps send nothing at all, which is the intended result.

Before you fork

Does it need a Reddit account, and could it get us banned?

It reads through the Reddit API with a connected account, and reading is the whole of what it does. No posting, commenting or voting operation exists anywhere in this template, and its instructions forbid all of them, so the behaviour that gets brands banned is not available to it. What you do with a thread afterwards is your call, made as yourself.

Our product name is a common word. Will the channel be unusable?

Common word names are the usual situation here rather than the exception, and the sweep assumes it. Collisions get dropped before anything is counted, so a band, a game item or an unrelated company sharing your name never reaches you. If week one still feels busy, cut the watch list down to your domain and your exact product name, and name the four or five subreddits that matter rather than searching all of Reddit.

What does an hourly schedule cost to run?

One agent run each hour, and the hours that read a long comment thread cost more than the hours that find nothing. In practice most are cheap because most are empty. You can trade speed for cost by moving to every three hours, at the price of missing a thread's first hour, which is the main reason to run this at all.