Chasing virality is getting your brand nowhere
đ°Â NoGood News Vol. 112 | More on viral marketing, brand building on Reddit, and query fan-out
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Here's a quick TL;DR of what's below:
The cost of virality: Everyone wants to go viral, but only a few brands ask what happens after. The truth is, the attention you earn isnât yours; it belongs to the platforms that serve their own engagement metrics.
Build your Reddit marketing strategy: Reddit is the ultimate home base for community-driven, conversational, and almost raw user-generated content. Itâs the go-to platform for users seeking answers to any niche question or decision, and now, brands are tapping in. So much so that they may have just found a new home for social content.
Understanding query fan-out: Query fan-out is the reason some brands rank in AI search results while others go invisible. And your brandâs visibility depends on whether your content surfaces for any of those queries, most of which youâve never seen and canât predict.
Ready? Let's get into it.Â
đ The cost of virality
The truth behind what it means to "go viral"
TikTokâs For You Page rewrote the rules of virality entirely. The FYP doesnât care about your follower count, nor does it prioritize content from accounts you follow. Instead, it serves an endless stream of content selected by algorithm.
Pre-FYP virality was something that happened to content as it moved through social networks.
Post-FYP virality is something the algorithm decides to make happen.
The platform chooses what goes viral based on engagement signals, watch time, and retention metrics that creators and brands can influence, but never fully control. The For You Page model has since been adopted by Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and virtually every social platform trying to compete for attention.
This is the environment brands operate in now. Viral marketing used to require building an audience first, then creating something that audience would amplify. Todayâs viral marketing requires creating content that an algorithm deems worthy of amplification to people whoâve never heard of you. The mechanics of spread have been automated, industrialized, and the power has almost entirely shifted from human networks to algorithms.
The false promise of viral attention assumes that you own the viral attention that you garner. The truth is, youâre renting attention from algorithms that owe you nothing and can revoke access without explanation.
đą Build your Reddit marketing strategy
Why Reddit matters more than you think it does
With the introduction of AI mode and Google AI Overviews, users increasingly access out-of-the-box answers to their questions, rather than going through the traditional search-and-click-the-blue-links motions weâve been so used to since the dot-com boom.
To Googleâs credit, the tech giant clearly saw this shift coming, seeing as they signed a $60 million deal with Reddit in 2024, allowing the search engine to use Reddit as a training source for its LLMs. OpenAI followed with a similar partnership shortly after, and for an obvious reason: Redditâs conversational format and authentic user discussions were exactly what AI models needed to sound less robotic and more human.
As of today, Reddit (along with other social sources like YouTube and LinkedIn) is consistently one of the most-cited domains across LLMs, based on an analysis of 5M+ citations across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.
Which means the question we as marketers should be asking at this point is no longer âshould we optimize for AI search?â Itâs âwhat information are AI models actually parsing through when they research entities?â
News flash: theyâre not just scanning your carefully crafted website copy or your owned thought leadership content. Theyâre also indexing whatever people happened to say about you on Reddit two years ago. And that becomes part of your brand reputation, whether you participated in shaping it or not.
đ Understanding query fan-out
Everything you need to know about who shows up in AI answers and who doesnât
Query fan-out is an information retrieval technique in which AI search systems expand a single user query into multiple subqueries, executing them in parallel to gather comprehensive information before generating a response.
Think of it this way: traditional search takes a single question and returns a ranked list of pages. Query fan-out takes one question, breaks it into 5-20 related questions, searches for all of them simultaneously, and weaves the best answers together.
How to optimize content for query fan-out
Create modular, self-contained sections: Each section should independently answer a specific question. Use clear H2s and H3s that match natural language queries.
Use structured formats: AI systems preferentially select certain content types such as tables, bulleted lists, FAQ sections, how-to schemas, and comparison schemas.
Address entity-attribute coverage: Fan-out analysis reveals which entities (products, companies, concepts) and attributes (features, specs, prices) matter for your topic. Gaps represent optimization opportunities, so fill them systematically to ensure comprehensive coverage.
Maintain freshness: AI systems heavily weight recency for time-sensitive topics. Weâve found that content updated within the last 90 days gets cited 2.3x more often than content older than 12 months for dynamic categories.
đď¸ Q&A with an expert
A bi-weekly interview series with the best in the game
Q: Whatâs the biggest mistake a brand can make when they first approach Reddit marketing?
A: Treating it like every other social channel. Most brands show up on Reddit with the same playbook they use everywhere else (think: polished marketing copy, promotional posts, link sharing) and then wonder why they get downvoted into oblivion or outright banned. Redditâs entire culture is built on rejecting this exact approach. The biggest mistake is thinking you can optimize your way around the authenticity prerequisite.
You canât automate helpfulness, or A/B test your way into trust. The brands that succeed on Reddit are the ones willing to show up as actual humans with actual expertise, answering real questions without immediately steering every conversation back to their product.
Q: Do you think brand participation on Reddit destroys the authenticity that made it valuable?
A: Not if the brand actually has something useful to contribute. The problem is, most brands tend to show up hollow and treat Reddit like a distribution channel instead of a conversation. But when you look at the brands doing it right, theyâre adding to the authenticity culture, rather than taking away from it.
Contrary to popular belief, Reddit doesnât hate brands, but it does hate smoke and mirrors. The authenticity only gets destroyed when brands fake participation by using agencies to astroturf, deploying canned responses, or trying to game the system. If youâre genuinely helpful and transparent about who you are, Reddit makes room for that. If youâre not, the community will tell you to leave.
Thatâs the filter working exactly as it should.
âď¸ We wish we wrote this
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đ Keeping up on the socials
Because IYKYK is better than FOMO:
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