Organizing A Reddit AMA For Your Band – Ditto Music Shares Why And How
Ditto Music's social media team have worked on projects for brands like Starbucks and musicians like American Aquarium and Louisa Wendorff, who recently hit number 1 on Billboard Heatseekers.
Guest Post by Marilee Chang
With a Music Subreddit of over six million subscribers, Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” interviews are a great way of interacting with fans, getting exposure and gaining new fans. They are essentially Q&A sessions where anyone can literally ask anything, and where the band hosting the AMA can engage with a wide audience as well as use that platform to make announcements, share links to their music and dish out interesting information about themselves.
There are a few things to know about how the AMAs work:
One a day: Reddit has a few AMA guidelines, and some of the subreddits, like the Music one, have their own as well. There can only be one AMA on the Music subreddit everyday, to make sure that each one gets the right amount of exposure and doesn’t take away from another one. The Reddit staff are very accommodating - you can reach out to them directly at redditama@gmail.com to let them know that your AMA is taking place and to get any extra pointers!
Sufficient time: Each AMA needs to last a minimum of one hour. This ensures the band has time to answer as many questions as possible – feel free to stay on longer though if you have the time!
Variety: Make sure you are answering a wide variety of questions, not just the ones about your upcoming tour. People have the freedom of asking you literally anything – and the more questions you answer, the more people will take an interest in your band.
Authenticity: Bands need to host the AMA themselves. This means there can be no posting on behalf of someone, so no asking your agent/social media savvy sister to do it for you. And please don’t use pre-written answers for interviews that you’ve been a part of previously; the whole point of hosting an AMA is to answer questions in real time, and make yourselves genuinely available to fans.
Details: Try to keep your answers detailed and interesting. This makes it far more entertaining for redditors taking part in your AMA and it gives that extra human touch that fans will be looking for. 
We helped American Aquarium to prepare for their Reddit AMA, which attracted over 200 comments in just one hour. They were voted Hardest Working Band in 2014, and hosting that AMA helped them reach out to a whole new audience. We can organise AMA sessions for our PR clients, creating graphics, establishing a connection for them with Reddit, and making sure the information gets out there as much as possible. Just take a look at that tweet following the announcement of American Aquarium doing their AMA – as we said before, AMAs are a GREAT way of getting exposure.
