Reddit as a Recruitment Tool

[Aimee 1,135]

As someone who was brought to the VHL through a post in the Pittsburgh Penguins subreddit, I think it’s important that we try to use Reddit as a recruitment tool. Obviously posting to other subreddits was a good idea for a while and I know that a lot of groups have closed off to the idea of outsiders posting. However, we have our own subreddit which is so barren it might as well not exist. For starters, there are only 5 members including myself so clearly there is no community there and no one is interacting. So here are a few suggestions I have which can be worked on as a group both from within and out of the recruitment team.

 

Branding

 

Other than the name r/VictoryHockeyLeague there is no branding on the subreddit. The banner, theme, and icon are all standard Reddit blue. The icon for starters, is just the VHL logo. Pretty simple and an easy place to start. Now, I don’t know if we have anything laying around that we could use for a banner but I’m sure someone would be able to whip one up for a quick and easy 6 TPE. As for the theming and color scheme of the page, I don’t know if that’s a subreddit feature that is easy to change or requires someone with HTML to fix up but I’m sure someone could figure out how to make everything either black or dark gray to go with the forum and icon colors.

 

 

Content

 

As of right now, the only two posts on the subreddit are that the VHL has been created from 5 years ago and a hello from 4 years ago by Dil. Now, we certainly don’t need original content exclusively for the page but we can all cross-platform post our content of images and articles. Hell, that might open more people up to discussing or commenting if they are more inclined to use Reddit over the forum. Content also creates traffic and activity which will then push some content to the front page or at least to areas of the site that can easily get new eyes. Now of course that won’t guarantee that just because someone takes interest in the subreddit that it will transfer to them coming to the forum to join, but traffic is always good for any social media algorithm.

 

 

How-To

 

Since Reddit allows you to pin content to the top, I feel like this would be a great place to post how-to videos for using the site and also a way to introduce people quickly and easily to the concept. Not everyone knows how a sim league works (I didn’t when I joined) so they may think it’s too complex or not interactive enough for their comfort. I think it wouldn’t take too much work for a person or group to work on putting videos together. A simple voice over script and some screen capturing and mouse tracking could lead to a good starter video. I know we have some on a YouTube channel somewhere but I believe that those are a few years old and are now obsolete in many ways since not only did the attributes change but even the creating a player part of the process has been updated. I think it would go over well to recreate those videos with updated information.

 

Overall, I think that if we use it correctly, Reddit could be a great recruitment tool. It will take some time to get things going but I believe that in the long run, it could lead to people to the VHL and a tickle of new members could be possible.

 

612 words for week ending 11/26/2023