Social Media 101: Using Reddit to Promote Bilingualism

When you search for multilingualism or bilingual education online, many of the websites that appear in search engine results sometimes are not of very good quality or they are English-only/anti-bilingual advocacy sites. It’s important that we use the internet to our advantage in order to promote sites with quality and accurate content about multilingualism and multilingual/bilingual education.

Many of us use twitter and facebook, but I’ve also received success with site visits from other social media networks, most notably reddit.com. I initially started posting (in the linguistics group) some blog posts that I had been reading throughout the bilingual blogosphere, However, I found some group members to be a tad bit too clique-ish and downright rude for my taste.

I decided to just start my own page about bilingualism. I completely forgot about it until just recently, and I only have one other reader besides myself. I would really like to build up the group with people who are interested in bilingualism and create a space where people can link to their own blogs and also promote the content of others.

This is how it works:

• Create an account.
• Once you have created an account, visit the bilingualism page and click on the green button that says “Front page”. This will add the bilingualism group to your reddit strip up at the top of the page.
• When you have a chance, you can click on the “My Reddits” strip in the upper left hand corner. When you hit “edit”, you can see all of the reddit groups that are on the top strip of your page. You can click on + Front page to add it to your strip, or – Front page to delet it. The top strip basically signifies the groups that you belong to. Once you have removed the reddit groups that you don’t want to belong to, you can search reddit and add more if you would like. Or, you can just belong to our bilingualism group!
• When you find something about bilingualism online that you would like to share with other members of the group, you click on the “Submit a link” part of the page and include the link as well as the title. This will upload the article to the bilingualism group or other members to see.
• If you do not have any articles to upload, you can visit the page and read the uploaded articles. For the links that you like, you will click on the arrow that points up and you will click on the arrow that points down if you do not like something. Articles will move up in popularity the more votes that they receive and sometimes articles can make it to the front page of the reddit network, which results in a huge amount of site visits for bilingual bloggers who would like to increase their readership! You  can also leave comments on any of the links and have conversations with other members.
• If you have any articles that you would like to upload, you can always leave them in our comments section here, and I will upload them for you.
• The group currently only has two members, and I have only uploaded the following articles. I will be uploading more of your articles soon, so if you have one that you would like to be uploaded please let me know. Once a week we will be uploading a widget where you can vote through the widget, provided that you have already signed up for the group:

Initially it seems confusing, but after a while you will get the hang of it and it is a great source of online communities who link to information that you are specifically interested in. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave comments here or email me at multilingualmania(at)yahoo.com. If you are trying to promote your own blog, this is a social media network that you really need to use!!

I hope you join! If we can build readership of the bilingualism group, we will better be able to spread accurate information about bilingualism and multilingualism in the online world!!

Tagged as: Social Media