r/SocialMediaMarketing rules, stats, and what to post

This is a community for social media marketing professionals. The description says it exists so people can share industry-relevant information, discuss best practices, and give each other constructive critique. So the people posting here are practitioners, people who do this work for a living and want to talk shop with other people who do the same work. The rules back that up. They protect real discussion from fake promotion, they keep hiring and service ads contained in monthly threads, and they want arguments to stay respectful. Read it as a workplace for social media marketers, not a marketplace.

Four rules decide your fate here. “Be Civil.” means disagreements are fine but personal attacks are not tolerated. “No Deceptive Promotion or Manipulation.” is the big one for marketers, because it bans coordinated or inauthentic activity to boost a person, company, product, or service, and it bans astroturfing, which means posing as a regular user to promote something for personal or financial gain. The rule also warns that if your comment history shows you plugging the same link or service over and over with no other discussion, you should assume your post or comment will be deleted. “No Social Media Account Selling.” is blunt, anyone selling social media accounts here gets permanently banned. “Please keep Job Opportunities and Service Advertisements in their Monthly Threads.” means all job posts and ads for social media marketing services go only in the designated monthly threads.

Post the kind of thing a working social media marketer would want to read. Share industry-relevant information, like a lesson from a campaign you ran, a change you noticed on a platform, or a best practice you tested. Ask for constructive critique on something real you built, like a content plan or a channel strategy, and be open about who you are when you do it. If you want to offer a service or hire someone, put it in the monthly thread the rules point to. If you link to something you made, make sure the rest of your activity here shows you are a genuine participant and not just a plug machine.

Do not post jobs or service ads outside the monthly threads, because the rules require those to live there exclusively. Do not sell social media accounts, that is a permanent ban with no warning. Do not astroturf, meaning do not pretend to be a regular user while secretly promoting your own thing. Do not run coordinated or inauthentic activity to boost yourself or your company. Do not turn your comment history into a wall of the same link, because the moderators explicitly say they will delete posts and comments from people who do that. And do not attack people personally when a debate gets heated, keep it civil.

What stands out to me here is how much of the rulebook is about hiding who you are. The astroturfing clause and the comment history check tell me this room has been burned by fake regular users, so the honest move is to be openly yourself from day one. I also like that they give promotion a legal home in the monthly threads, because that tells you the community is not anti-marketing, it is anti-clutter. If you cannot survive a month of helping people before you ever mention your thing, this is not your community yet.