In the two years since Reddit opened its first Canadian office in Toronto, the social media network said Canada has been good for business.
Since launching its Canadian office, Reddit’s team has grown by more than 15 times, and is now home to the second-largest workforce outside of the United States. Along with its second-largest workforce, Canada also represents Reddit’s third-largest market globally after the US and the United Kingdom.
“Canada…is a top priority for us and our internationalization strategy.”
“Canada is already home to a deeply engaged Reddit audience that is growing steadily by the day and it is a top priority for us and our internationalization strategy,” said Reddit’s COO, Jen Wong at the time Reddit established its Canadian office.
According to the platform, it now has more than 90 Canadian employees in sales, product, and engineering. And the startup is still hiring. For its Canadian offices, Reddit is currently looking for a handful of software engineers.
R/Canada, the sub-Reddit forum devoted to all things Canadian, attracts more than 1.7 million community members, and is growing 42 percent year-over-year, according to the platform.
Other popular local Reddit site communities include r/personalfiancecanada, r/hockey, and a series of geographical communities such as r/ontario, r/vancouver, and r/ottawa.
“Establishing a dedicated presence in the market will ensure best-in-class teams, tools and resources to continue to build out our growing user base and level-up our offering to local clients in a more focused, nuanced way,” Wong said.
Reddit’s use of Canada to grow its workforce and increase its user base is not unique for social media companies. Prior to its current iteration under Elon Musk, Twitter took advantage of Canada’s highly trained workforce, and saw Canada as a place to test new products before rolling them out elsewhere.
For example, Canada became one of the first test markets for Twitter notes, enabling users to write up to 2,500 words in a post; and in early 2022 Twitter enabled Canadian users as one of the first to be able to display their NFTs as their profile picture.
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That has since changed a bit after the recent layoffs when Elon Musk took over Twitter that affected an unspecified number of Canadian employees, including managing director Paul Burns, and Michele Austin, who served as Twitter’s director of public policy for Canada and the United States.
Reddit recently partnered with brand insight agency Talk Shoppe to better understand how Canadian users feel about brand participation on Reddit, commissioning a white paper titled Find Your People. One of the insights they found is that local users are more likely to trust a brand that participates on Reddit than in brands they see advertising on other platforms.
As well, the platform found that Canadian redditors are more likely to make purchase decisions if recommended by others on Reddit, and are more open to ads that provide new or useful information about a brand or service.
One of the things that has helped drive advertising across the platform is community engagement. An r/Alberta Food Bank Fundraiser in 2022 during the winter holiday season expanded to 10 Reddit communities across Canada. They all took part in donating, volunteering and spreading awareness, raising over $34,000 CAD as part of Reddit’s Community Funds Bringing Community Ideas to Life with Community Funds program. Reddit matched the donations with an additional $20,000.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Brett Jordan.
