Reddit Keyword Monitor & Lead Scraper

🕵️‍♂️ Reddit Keyword Monitor: Leads & Mentions

Turn Reddit into your personal radar. Monitor keywords, track competitors, and find high-intent leads in real-time.

This Actor scans Reddit for specific keywords across specific subreddits (or globally) and returns only the fresh results from the last X hours. It is designed for Lead Generation, Brand Monitoring, and Social Listening.

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🚀 Why use this Actor?

Unlike generic Reddit scrapers that dump thousands of random posts, this tool is built for precision monitoring:

• ⚡️ "New" Only: Only fetches posts created in the last X hours (e.g., "Last 24 hours"). Perfect for daily automated runs.
• 🎯 Granular Targeting: Search specific keywords inside specific subreddits (e.g., search "CRM" only in r/sales).
• 🛡 Noise Filtering: Automatically discards posts with specific Negative Keywords (e.g., filter out "homework" or "hiring").
• 🧹 Low-Effort Removal: Automatically ignores image-only posts or empty discussions to ensure you only get high-quality text threads.
• 🏷 Smart Tagging: The output includes matched_keyword metadata, so you know exactly which search term triggered the result.

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💡 Best Practices: How to get High-Quality Leads

Reddit is a massive database. If your search terms are too broad, you will get noise. Use these strategies to filter the gold from the garbage:

1. The "Long-Tail" Strategy (High Intent)

Don't search for generic industry terms. Search for intent.

• ❌ Bad: "Marketing" (Too broad, will return news and memes).
• ✅ Good: "Marketing Agency recommendations", "Best marketing tool", "How to market SaaS".

2. The "Problem" Strategy (Lead Gen)

People come to Reddit to complain. Search for the problems your product solves.

• Keywords: "scam", "alternative to [Competitor]", "too expensive", "help with".
• Example: If you sell a CRM, search for "Salesforce too expensive" or "Hubspot alternative".

3. Use Negative Keywords (Critical)

Reddit is full of teenagers and memes. Use the negative_keywords input to clean your feed.

• If monitoring "AI": Add negative keywords like ["character.ai", "homework", "game", "chat bot", "waifu"].
• If monitoring "SaaS": Add negative keywords like ["hiring", "intern", "salary"] (to avoid job posts).

4. Use Quotes for Exact Match

If you are searching for a short acronym, Reddit's fuzzy search might fail you. Wrap it in quotes.

• Input: "CRM" (This forces Reddit to find that exact string).

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⚙️ Input Parameters

searches (Array of Objects)

This is the heart of the monitor. You can define multiple search pairs.

• keyword: The term to search for (e.g., "SaaS Marketing").
• subreddit: (Optional) The specific community to search (e.g., marketing). Leave this empty to search ALL of Reddit (Global).

hours_back (Number)

How far back in time to look?

• Default: 24.
• Set this to match your scheduler. If you run the actor once a day, set it to 24. If you run it every hour, set it to 1.

negative_keywords (Array of Strings)

Any post containing these words (case-insensitive) will be discarded.

• Example: ["hiring", "job", "meme"]

searchComments (Boolean)

• false (Default): Searches only Post Titles and Bodies.
• true: Also searches inside comments (Higher volume, but can be noisier).

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📦 Sample Output

The Actor produces a clean JSON format enriched with metadata.

{  
    "matched_keyword": "Hubspot alternative",  
    "matched_subreddit": "sales",  
    "type": "post",  
    "title": "We are leaving Hubspot, it's too expensive. What should we use?",  
    "text": "We are a small team of 5 and the pricing just hiked up again...",  
    "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/sales/comments/xyz/leaving_hubspot/",  
    "username": "SalesGuy123",  
    "community": "r/sales",  
    "upvotes": 45,  
    "comments_count": 12,  
    "created_utc": 1767091411,  
    "created_at": "2025-12-30T10:43:31.000Z"  
}

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🛠 Use Cases

1. Competitor Monitoring

Track whenever your competitor is mentioned.

• Keywords: "[Competitor Name]", "[Competitor] vs", "[Competitor] pricing".
• Goal: Jump into the conversation and offer your tool as a better alternative.

2. High-Intent Lead Generation

Find people explicitly asking for a solution.

• Keywords: "looking for software", "recommendations for", "best tool for".
• Subreddits: r/entrepreneur, r/smallbusiness, r/marketing.

3. Reputation Management

Track your own brand name.

• Keywords: "[Your Brand Name]".
• Goal: Support customers or put out fires immediately.

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⚖️ Rate Limits & Proxy

This Actor includes built-in sleeps between requests to respect Reddit's rate limits. It is designed to be lightweight and efficient. Standard Apify proxies are recommended.