Worth asking whether most social media marketing strategies are optimizing for the wrong signal entirely.

The metrics that get reported most often, impressions, reach, follower growth, are easy to measure and largely disconnected from actual buying behavior. In my experience the platforms where people are actively expressing a problem or asking for a solution get far less attention than they probably deserve.

Reddit is a reasonable example of this. The way I look at it most subreddits in any B2B adjacent category contain people who are mid decision. They've already identified a problem. They're asking the community what to use or what to avoid. That is a fundamentally different intent signal than someone scrolling past a sponsored post.

The challenge is that Reddit doesn't reward the same approaches that work on LinkedIn or Instagram. The communities can identify promotional content quickly and the response is usually hostile. What actually works is genuine contribution over time which is a harder case to make to a client who wants results in thirty days.

Makes sense to think about Reddit less as a broadcast channel and more as a listening and participation channel. The distribution potential is secondary to the signal quality.

Curious how others here are framing Reddit to clients or whether it's mostly still treated as too unpredictable to include in a formal strategy.