Reddit, AI spam bots explore new ways to show ads in your feed
#For sale: Ads that look like legit Reddit user posts
“We highly recommend only mentioning the brand name of your product since mentioning links in posts makes the post more likely to be reported as spam and hidden. We find that humans don’t usually type out full URLs in natural conversation and plus, most Internet users are happy to do a quick Google Search,” ReplyGuy’s website reads.
I don’t want to really get into it, but I was considered kind of an “expert on Reddit“ several years ago, as absolutely cringe as that sounds. A couple of companies asked me to weigh in on how to “leverage it” and I told them the same thing over and over again: if you want sustained, “natural” opportunities, you need somebody who spends 20 to 30 minutes a day hanging out in relevant subs looking for truly appropriate opportunities and build a relationship with the community. People honestly don’t always mind brands being around, what they don’t like is their obfuscating their intentions.
The alternative: make a bunch of accounts, pay whoever you can pay off (which can backfire because you gave receipts to somebody proving you want to pay to play while pretending to be normal users and some users love posting that stuff), then astroturf the shit out of it and hope you don’t get exposed. Those are basically it lol
The moment they heard it required any sort of work to not take the risk, they never went through with my suggestions and they would get frustrated, basically asking me over and over again “who do we pay to get stuff out there?” Because they were thinking in terms of Instagram and such with influencers, which is not impossible with Reddit, but it’s not quite as baked into it - or at least it wasn’t at the time and power users are kind of a different breed lol
They didn’t want to pay for proper advertising, they didn’t want to put in the time to actually join the community, and they also didn’t want to spend too much money while also trying to deceive the communities. They basically actively chose to close the door on every viable option.
I was in a sales meeting and they hired some expert to teach them how to write good emails. I had been doing some cold emails to customers and my response rate was through the roof, so they asked me how I did it. I said “Well, I kept it short and sounded like a person who wanted to help them out.”
This blew the sales goons’ minds. They thought you needed a bunch of buzzwords and calls to action to get a response, but people get that shit so much they immediately turn off. But when they get an email that says “Hey, I see you use our product. I’d love to show you some tips to help you out. Click this link and grab some time on my calendar” they don’t.
It should not require any industry knowledge to decipher those kinds of communications. People think they’ll never get an opportunity to dazzle the potential customer with their knowledge, when the entire discussion kind of assumes you know what you’re talking about. It’s always felt like it’s more in service of the sales person than anything else when people write like that lol