By The developer of Redective has responded to my questions about his tool here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Redective/comments/49k3ce/i_feel_stupid_for_not_coming_here_first_i_should/d16hbk9
The timezone is based on your device (Computer, Phone, whatever). Whatever it has it set to, that’s what the hours will be converted to. A quick way to test is to try the user “blahalb” (I don’t know who this is, but some random searching reveals they only have 1 post, so they’re my new test subject :)). On my system, in California, it says the hour active is 22. I assume it will be different for you. – NoShirtNoShoesNoDice, Redective developer
Hi everyone, welcome to another Tool Highlight Tuesday post. In this weeks video I cover a tool I use for content marketing especially when I’m trying to get the attention of Reddit users. It’s called Redective. Redective is a search and data aggregation tool and while it doesn’t have all the features I’d want in such a tool, it does have the ability to display some very helpful data about Reddit users and about different communities on the site, known as sub-reddits.
Before using Redective you should know a few things:
- Who your target audience is
- How reddit works
Once you’re ready let’s continue.
Searching a Users History on Reddit
This part requires you to do a little extra work upfront. Once you’ve defined your target audience and discovered the subreddits they use, it’s time to track down some power users. To do this you can simply navigate to the subreddit of choice and then click on the ‘top’ tab. Take the first 10 or 15 or 20, however many you want, and we’ll use those in this exercise. I’m going to select 3, just for the sake of time. What I’m looking for here is a poster to the subreddit that I should approach about posting some funny content of mine or even just paying them to tell me they think it could do well on Reddit.
Go to the tool and select “search user” in the first drop down. Copy and past the name of the first Reddit user you want to look at in the text box. For this example that would be ‘OB1FBM’. Finally make sure that ‘Redective’ is selected in the second drop down and click the search button. The tool is going to download about 15 pages of data and it takes a few minutes so you can probably go make a sandwich, get a beer, do some push ups, or just sit there and stare at it. When the data loads you’ll be looking at all of the data for a user. Since we’re a specific subreddit we want to only see that data so click on the filter button between the search box and the data set and look for the box that says ‘filter by subreddit’ in the top left hand corner. Here you can type the name of a subreddit and see how this particular user posts to it. In this example we’ll see that the user has posted only 1 time to the subreddit.
Now we want to build a few comparisons of our Redditors so let’s gather a few data points here. You have to do this manually because Redective doesn’t have an export function, at least not at the time of this blog being written. We’re only going to pull a few data points out of this to keep it simple. We’re going to look at number of post submissions to the subreddit and amount of karma gained in the last 6 months. We’ll use this to compare the three users to each other. You’ll notice that you don’t need to reset the filter for each search. Redective maintains the filter options between searches, which will save a little bit of time here. Now if you’re following along you probably noticed that we can’t pull the submission karma for the top 3 redditors in this subreddit for the last 6 months because each one is a one and done post from a few years ago. To fix this go back to the subreddit and click on the “Top” tab, then look just above the list of submissions and you’ll see a drop down that is most likely set to “all time” change this to a selection of your choosing between “past hour”, “past 24 hours”, “past week”, and “past year”. Each subreddit is going to be unique in how frequently a user is popular and then not popular, this is just a side effect of how Reddit works polevaulting users to popularity and then obscurity within each community on varying timescales.
Searching a Subreddit’s Content and History
Now we’re going to get some data about a subreddit. Our goal here is to help create content that might appeal to a specific community. For the purpose of this blog we’ll keep with using the /r/funny subreddit. Go back up to the search box and change the first drop down to “search a subreddit” this should change the search feature from 3 boxes to 2. In the text box type the name of the subreddit you’re trying to search, but do not including an /’s or the /r/ in front of it, so for this example just type “funny” without quotations. The redective tool will start downloading information about a subreddit. It will not download all of a subreddits data, but it does download about 9-11 pages worth. In this example I was able to download data on posts from March 1st to the 8th (today).
There’s quite a bit of data here and no easy export feature. One thing I like to do is copy out the words used in the subreddit and use those to generate a word cloud, I’ll give that word cloud to my team as an asset to help generate content ideas (this is part of my Thought Farming ideation methodology). It takes a bit of work but in Chrome you can see the code and copy it out, then paste it into something like notepad or notepad++ to pull out the relevant data. I haven’t perfected a way to do this really fast and effective just yet though I would bet a macro or something else could be used to remove everything but the words and the count you want. The words are wrapped in span tags which are wrapped in table tags, etc… Right now I just copy one row of data out and use the ‘replace’ feature of whatever text editor to remove every instance of that code out of the code block which leaves my desired data. The process takes a few minutes per page of data so I only use about 5 or so pages of data. If that’s going to clunky for you just hand type the data into a spreadsheet placing the words in one column and count in the next. We’ll need to modify this data little bit to make a word cloud (you can just leave the data in excel if you want and make a word cloud there). For this example I’m using the WordItOut.com free word cloud generator. This generator requires that the words be on the right with a colon and no spaces and then the count of that word on the left (i.e. word:5). Once you have the content ready go ahead and copy paste it into text box on the word cloud generator and click on the green “Generate” button.
