How to properly join a community discussion within my product niche?
Hi
I'm building a platform for digital board games that's all about bringing people around one TV to play popular board/card games together.
So far we have a pretty good platform with 3 popular games available to play.
I'm working on building an audience around this product. Yesterday I was on the boardgames sub-reddit which has 2.5M members, so a pretty sizeable niche within the overall games community. The top discussion was a thread with hundreds of comments about traditional vs digital board games, and the pros and cons of each.
Naturally I'd want to join this discussion, both as a fan and a maker of a relevant product. But so far my contributions feel like shameless plugs or ads.
I even wonder if logically explaining the pros and cons to your own product is the best approach.
Does anyone have personal examples of how they've tactfully created conversations around their product without seeming salesy or try hard?
Thanks for your advice
You hit the nail on the head. You are both a fan and a maker of a relevant product, so start by answering questions on the thread that you know the answer to. And as you said, without seeming salesy or trying hard, genuinely join the discussion without mentioning your product at first in order to build that rapport. But... that also means that you may not get any eyeballs on your product till your 10th or 20th comment. Unfortunately that also means that this top discussed thread may pass you by for now. If you would like to short-circuit this, you can try promoted posts or check to see if the subreddit has promotions allowed on some days - some will have rules saying that promotions are allowed on Sundays, etc.