We have been trying the top 8 social media sites and pitting them head to head for our new business to see which one makes the most sense for us to focus on. In the first round Twitter easily beat Pinterest and Reddit beat Stumbleupon in a landslide. Leading us to a semi-final match-up of Twitter vs. Reddit.
Reddit traffic is pretty easy to attain and I'm personally a huge fan of the site, however there is no momentum from day one to now. The first article we posted on Reddit seems to get the same amount of traffic as a popular article from this week. If we were to focus all of our social media efforts on Reddit I feel it would mainly be a time suck. 90% of my time on Reddit is not business related and I easily get distracted going on non business sub Reddits. It's fun to explore Reddit but it can easily be very distracting when you go on there for accounting and end up on pranks gone wrong. This can also be a distraction on Twitter with the hashtag trends but even if I see something I'm interested in on Twitter I seem to be done looking at it in 20 seconds as opposed to 20 minutes on Reddit.
The business related sub Reddits are great for learning new information or helping other business owners but overall it's not extremely beneficial to our site. Another problem is that each sub Reddit has it's own guidelines for submitting articles. For example our latest article about small businesses in NYC could not be posted in small business or entrepreneurship.
Twitter on the other hand is not only beating Reddit in traffic but it's going up every week. The small amount of followers we have on Twitter seems to be growing into a network of trusted founders that we admire. On Reddit I have had some great conversations but it seems very unlikely that I will ever communicate with them again. On Twitter relationships seem to be growing quickly and I can easily see us developing a great community of entrepreneurs on Twitter soon.
The bottom line is that Reddit is awesome for personal time, but for Symmetry50 Twitter will easily be moving on to the final round of our social media competition vs. Linkedin.