'Like qualitative research without having to pay': A bank's guide to Reddit

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Reddit teems with digital communities of anonymous users who are eager to debate politics, recommend recipes and swap pictures of baby corgis. Within these conversational forums known as subreddits — which exceed 100,000 — is what some people think is a resource underutilized by banks: users passionate about topics relevant to financial services.

Why Banks Should Monitor Reddit

"Personal finance" is the 37th largest subreddit on the Reddit network with 20 million members. The r/CreditCards subreddit has 1.4 million members and is in the top 1%. A subreddit devoted to the Robinhood app has a million members, even more than r/banking, at 96,000 members. The four megabanks in the U.S. each have unofficial, dedicated subreddits peppered with queries about transaction snafus and closing accounts.

Access to anonymous reviews of financial products is not unique to Reddit, "except in the extent of its seeming ubiquity," said Andrew Grant, partner at Runway LLC, a legal consulting firm for financial services companies and fintechs. "Reddit has this built-in ecosystem already that lends itself to people creating subreddits for financial services."

Banks can use Reddit as a listening tool to glean insights about customer preferences, detect trends in customer complaints or inspire consumer-oriented content about confusing topics. The biggest risk lies in joining a conversation as a representative of a bank, since pushing an agenda violates the Reddit ethos.

Real-Life Examples of Banks Using Reddit

First National Bank of Omaha, or FNBO, actively promotes itself on social media sites such as Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Reddit is unique because it's not about brand engagement or telling your brand story, said Regina DeMars, director of content marketing and social media strategy at the $31 billion-asset Nebraska bank. Instead, she said, "You can learn a lot about your brand by listening." DeMars finds Reddit most useful for getting a pulse on customer sentiment and then digging deeper to see if it echoes recurring complaints or queries the bank receives elsewhere.

Reddit can also be unreliable: Many threads have been dormant for years. Others have spiraled out of control. DeMars has seen plenty of misinformation.

Still, Reddit is a way to get "unvarnished, unsolicited feedback on products," Grant said. "You can send people links to surveys, and you won't always get meaningful feedback from that." Customers may complain on Reddit or other social media platforms well before, or instead of, lodging a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

"I wouldn't advise a bank client to say 'we got this information from Reddit,'" said Henry Noye, a partner at Obermayer Rebmann Maxwell & Hippel, but he does not see any barriers for banks in using Reddit as a component of market research.

Turning Reddit Conversations Into Actionable Strategies

Ryan McInerny, vice president of product strategy at bank compliance software firm RiskScout, considers Reddit to be a primary research tool. For instance, a bank may want to increase the diversity of age ranges in its customer base. One place to start is by sifting through subreddits for its region and state. In the Washington state subreddit, McInerny found a thread started by a 19-year-old user seeking a credit union recommendation. The question received 42 responses.

"I can use that for competitive analysis," McInerny said. "Has something been working well for [the recommended credit unions] that we can emulate?" The r/personalfinance, r/financialindependence and r/smallbusiness subreddits may also be useful for unearthing financial needs and for running sentiment analysis on the data.

DeMars and her team will search for conversations on Reddit that mention FNBO by name, or competitors when they appear in the news. This information could inspire blog posts or other social media content that addresses questions or dispels misinformation.

Reddit conversations can provide insight into how people not enmeshed in the banking world think through financial challenges, news and headlines, said Brian Reilly, vice president of digital marketing at marketing firm BankBound.

"If you are a marketer and looking for some nuanced topics to write about — do we have content that addresses these questions, do we articulate how our products are a good solution for the problems people are shopping for?" Reilly said.

Reilly is not aware of any banks actively using Reddit right now. But he expects to see interest tick up in advertising on the site, especially in light of a partnership expansion the site announced in February with Google to surface more Reddit content.

About five years ago, Reilly tested advertising for some bank clients in subreddits dedicated to the specific geographies in which these banks were located but found little engagement and difficulty scaling. Reilly theorizes that advertising in subreddits with broader discussions about banking or saving could get more traction, for instance if a digital bank has a slick mobile app or a high certificate of deposit rate it wants to promote. He has a few community bank clients interested in testing Reddit ads more thoroughly, in both geographic and banking subreddits.

Advertising is appealing because "we can control the conversation," Reilly said.

Challenges of Using Reddit for Market Research

Piping into a conversation as a representative of a bank, however, is risky — and generally unadvised.

"Members are very protective," said Meghan Phillips, managing director of brand relationship design in the U.S. for R/GA, a brand design agency. (Reddit is a client of R/GA.) 

Moreover, a representative of the bank may need to make proper disclosures when discussing a product or abide by the bank's marketing rules — and, where appropriate, marketing rules imposed by law, such as Regulation Z, Runway's Grant said.

Atmos Financial, a nonbank company that invests customer deposits in solar and climate projects, has found a way to participate in Reddit conversations while following site etiquette.

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An Atmos Financial customer started the subreddit in June 2022. "I was honored our customers had made a subreddit for us," said Atmos co-founder and CEO Ravi Mikkelsen. But he was cautious about wading in. Mikkelsen had previously been kicked out of a personal finance subreddit for what the moderators called self-promotion after he responded to a user's question about how Atmos makes money. This time, he messaged the creator of the Atmos Financial subreddit to ask if he and his colleagues could ask or answer questions. He received their blessing.

"No press releases. We kept the more market-y stuff out of there," Mikkelsen said. "We wanted to post things that would be valuable to them, like our product releases. When they have questions they can tag us."

For instance, Mikkelsen started a thread several months ago to survey users on what they want to see from a technical or financial product perspective in Atmos. He received answers such as financial-planning tools, paper checks and the ability to add payable on death beneficiaries.

When a user asked whether Atmos partnered with Synapse or Evolve Bank & Trust, Mikkelsen clarified that the company had transitioned to Five Star Bank.

"It's not super active but the ones that engage when I ask questions [such as] 'what do you want to see, what are your comments and concerns,' — we got feedback," he said.

Atmos' social media channels include Instagram, LinkedIn, X, YouTube and Facebook. Mikkelsen finds the overlap among users is minimal, so customers may see a product update on Reddit that they wouldn't spot elsewhere.

"It's like qualitative research without having to pay for it," Phillips said. "It's so cliché in modern marketing to say find your community in a digital space but … once you're in it and can find your people, you're in it."