It’s easy to label reddit another distraction that could easily eat up your hours. But with decisive forethought and understanding of what this massively popular network has to offer, you can ensure you’re hip to the latest trends in business, marketing, venture capital and more.
Today we present the top five sub-reddits (or communities within reddit) where CEOs can glean insightful data about the news and views shaping their industry. We’d be remiss not to mention that with reddit, you get only what you put into it; so if you don’t tailor your reddit “front page” (the main feed, essentially)Â to include subscriptions of your favourite sub-reddits, you’ll be inundated with too many posts unrelated to your interests…and THAT is when you’ll feel you’ve wasted precious daylight on links and comment threads.
 r/business
If reddit were a magazine, r/business would be the feature section. This active community includes articles and columns on almost every aspect from business, from growth-hacking to acquisitions to the latest news in various industries. You won’t just find articles from the likes of Forbes or Bloomberg trending on r/business, but also company blog posts offering tips and advice that would have gone buried otherwise.
r/marketing
With 34,000+ subscribers, this forum is quite popular among marketing circles, and offers CEOs a peek into a side of a business he or she might not normally be privy to. What’s most common to see here are questions and discussions on marketing tech or optimizations tips, often tailored to a specific industry. Just note there is a dedicated sub-reddit only for asking marketing questions.
r/entrepreneur
For the more startup-oriented CEO, this sub-reddit offers a trove of links, tips and discussion threads. It can be quite fascinating to read an entrepreneur’s success story and see where your own company may find inspiration. On the other hand, many entrepreneurs post about the frustrating challenges they are facing, and if you reply with some advice as a commenter, you can begin a networking exchange that could prove fruitful IRL.
r/venturecapital
If your company is seeking VC dollars, or have already enjoyed such investment, this is the sub-reddit for you. Track any trends in the VC industry, such as certain markets gaining favour with venture capitalists. Learn from others’ missteps, or pass along some advice to win karma with a startup who might have gone down a similar path you faced. Just a warning: This sub-reddit isn’t wildly popular, so engagement is quite low compared to the previous sub-reddits.
r/dataisbeautiful
We couldn’t resist including a fun forum that flexes that trademark reddit geekiness. This sub-reddit is filled with visual representations of data that range from B2C to B2B to hiphop rhyme schemes to death penalty execution methods. Yes, /dataisbeautiful has it all. What may be inspiring for CEOs is learning how analytics can be visualized in many different ways, something that any business should be studying carefully in our increasingly Big Data-friendly world. Another warning: You’ll get so lost in all the creative ways these data lovers visualize their data pull, you’ll find those hours ticking away.
Did we miss any sub-reddits? Let us know in the comments below or via @B2BNewsNetwork!
Photo via Flickr, Creative Commons
