Dive Brief:
- Reddit has partnered with Sprinklr, making the customer experience management platform the first to offer brands listening and publishing access on the social media site, per a press release.
- Before the partnership, brands advertising on Reddit had to take a hands-on, manual approach that could make fostering engagement with users a time-consuming process. By leveraging Sprinklr's capabilities, businesses can view current and historical data for brand sentiment analytics and to make brand decisions faster.
- According to Sprinklr, the integration with Reddit offers marketers a number of benefits, including customer care and engagement with some measure of automation, product development insights based on Reddit discussions, crisis communications and personalized marketing based on user data.
Dive Insight:
Marketing on Reddit has been notoriously tricky to date. The site — which touts itself as "the front page of the internet" — has been around longer than most in the social media space, but its fans are extremely protective of a user experience that's remained largely unchanged and have been openly disdainful toward how other platforms like Twitter and Facebook are now cluttered with advertising. Unlike those websites, Reddit is largely built on fan discussion forums that are focused on specific topics, hobbies or pop culture ephemera, creating active but often insular communities that don't appreciate intrusion from corporate entities.
A Mashable report questions how Reddit users will react to brands having both listening and publishing access to the platform via Sprinklr. While brands will certainly appreciate the expanded toolkit, their efforts will be for naught if they don't integrate their messaging with authenticity and careful targeting. The news comes as Reddit is attempting to better monetize its site and an active user base that numbers in the hundreds of millions.
Its co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman has been making a concentrated effort to excise some of the more troll-ish, abusive behavior from the communities, The Wall Street Journal reported last month. Earlier this year, it ramped up video advertising and its self-serve ad platform in a bid to draw more brand interest. And, in July 2016, Reddit launched Promoted User Posts, an advertising program that allowed brands to sponsor user-generated content in a manner akin to influencer marketing. In return, users received a lifetime subscription to the site's premier membership program, Reddit Gold.
At the time, Huffman told Ad Age that Reddit's users "don’t like being bulls-----d" and that the platform is one where people will call out overt marketing.
