Mother’s Day is coming up (5/14), and Reddit has published a new guide that explains why its platform could be a valuable consideration for your Mother’s Day marketing push, and how to connect with Redditors around the event.

The 16-page guide includes a range of notes and pointers to help optimize your Mother’s Day approach, which is Reddit-specific, but likely also relates to how other social platforms see engagement around the event.

You can download the full guide här, but in this post, we’ll take a look at some of the highlights.

First off, Reddit provides an overview of its unique audience, and their engagement in Mother’s Day shopping.

As you can see in this chart, Reddit provides reach to users that are not active in other social apps, with one in five Reddit users being moms.

That provides unique insight into relevant conversations and interests.

Indeed, Reddit says that there are over 6,000 communities in the app that are actively discussing Mother’s Day and related topics.

That could provide a valuable pool of research for your planning and marketing, while also enabling you to connect with people researching specific products and offers.

Reddit also provides insight into when Mother’s Day discussion peaks, and how you should plan your marketing outreach accordingly.

There are also notes on specific ad types and promotions which could help to boost your campaigns, in order to connect with Reddit users around the event.

There are some handy notes here, which could be worth considering. And while Reddit may not seem like the most obvious channel for Mother’s Day marketing, there could well be opportunities there, both for market research and outreach, if you go looking.

You can download Reddit’s full Mother’s Day marketing guide här.

from the greater-fool-theory dept

Elon Musk’s next big revenue bet is that companies really, really, really want to show up as “verified.” All evidence suggests that very few Twitter users are interested in paying Elon $8/month to constantly break the site or engage in ego-driven experiments that make the general experience worse.

A few weeks ago, we found out that he’s trying to get organizations to pay $42,000 a month to access the Twitter API, and maybe that was just a framing technique. Because Twitter has announced the next round of its check mark program, which begins with deleting the “legacy” checkmark holders (which, honestly, to many of us is a huge relief), but also telling businesses and organizations they need to pay $1,000/month if they want to keep their checkmark.

The page for “Twitter Verified Organizations” says (laughably) that they’re “creating the most trusted place on the internet for organizations to reach their followers.” Which is kinda hilarious that anyone believes that. And, apparently, the way to create “the most trusted place” is to make sure that no users know whether or not organizations are legit or not såvida inte they’re willing to pay through the nose.

In the US, it’s a flat rate, $1,000 per month, with a $50/month additional fee for each “affiliate seat subscription.”

That “affiliate” seat subscription” appears to be for employees that work for the company who are promoting it:

The best marketing comes directly from real people on Twitter. Now, you can affiliate your organization’s champions so that everyone knows where they work. Affiliates receive a small image of their organization’s Twitter account profile picture next to their name every time they Tweet, send a DM, or appear in search. 

You can affiliate anyone who represents or is associated with your organization: leadership, product managers, employees, politicians, customer support, franchises, sub-brands, products and so on. An account you invite to affiliate must accept your invitation.

I’m sure some sucker companies are going to pay up, but this is going to get expensive very fast for any small or medium-sized business, so why bother? And, yes, this is all flat rate pricing, so giant consumer packaged goods companies may be willing to pay, but non-profits? Small businesses? Governments? It applies to all of them:

Twitter Verified Organizations enables organizations of all types–businesses, non-profits, and government institutions–to sign up and manage their verification and to affiliate and verify any related account. 

In some ways, this is just Musk making a bet on extortion. Organizations and governments that don’t pay will be much more likely to get impersonated on Twitter and risk serious problems. So Musk is basically betting on making life so bad for organizations that they’ll have to pay these ridiculous rates to avoid people impersonating them.

I’m not sure how that creates “the most trusted place on the internet,” but then again, I didn’t set $44 billion on fire to fuck up a website I didn’t understand.

Sparad i: extortion, non-profits, organizations, trust, verified

Companies: twitter

Despite concerns over its radically high pricing, Twitter is pushing ahead with the rollout of its ‘Verification for Organizations’ offering, which enables brands to purchase a gold checkmark for their main account, and verify their employee profiles as affiliates.

Twitter first put out the call for selected businesses to sign up to the program back in January, as part of its broader revamp of verification, which aims to both democratize access to checkmarks in the app, while also establishing a new revenue stream for the business.

Now, more brands in more regions are being invited to register their interest, which could soon see a lot more gold checkmarks and square profile pictures appearing in your feed.

If they’re willing to pay up. Twitter’s currently looking to charge businesses $1,000 per month for the option, which seems like a high price to pay for a different colored tick – and really, not much else.

As per the communications being sent out to businesses, for your $1,000 monthly investment, Verification for Organizations will give you:

• A gold checkmark on your brand account
• A square profile picture on your brand profile
• An affiliate badge, a smaller version of your brand profile image that’s added to approved accounts in the app
• Affiliates display on the main brand page, which shows all the accounts linked to the main brand profile

• Twitter Blue access for all brand and affiliated accounts

So you do get access to all the Twitter Blue features, for your main account and any profiles that you approve as affiliates. But you do also have to pay for each affiliate you register – if you want to approve your staff, and get them both an affiliate marker and a blue tick, you’ll have to pay $50, per month, for each profile you add in.

That seems like a lot – especially considering you can just pay $8 per month to sign your brand profile up to Twitter Blue and get a regular blue checkmark in the app. Maybe Twitter will eventually look to cut off Twitter Blue access for brand entities, but right now, you’re really paying an extra $992 per month for a different colored tick.

Is that worth it?

I guess, Twitter’s hoping that it can reach a critical mass of brands that sign up for a gold checkmark, which will then make it the new gold standard in brand recognition, and in turn, raise questions about the legitimacy of other brand accounts that don’t have that gold tick endorsement. That could force more brands to sign-up to the program, in order to ensure that they’re seen as the official brand entity in the app.

I’m not sure that’s going to work, but that seems to be the principle that Twitter’s going with, effectively using the value of exclusivity that was once afforded to the regular blue checkmark to make the new gold tick more desirable, thus boosting interest.

But it’s a lot. $1000 a month is likely beyond the reach of most SMBs, and it’ll be hard for any brand to justify the expanse, for so little in return.

Some reports have also suggested that Twitter’s giving away the gold checkmark to approved ad partners, as another means to make it a bigger thing, and that could be another effort to further incentivize take-up, by using competitive sensibilities to prompt other brands to want one as well.

Again, I don’t know that it’s the right approach, but Twitter’s, at the least, going to kick the tires on the option, at its current price point.

And it’s coming to more regions – Verification for Organizations is now available in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the UK, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, India, Indonesia, and Brazil.

With a heap of advertisers still not coming back to Twitter, Elon and Co. definitely need the extra money – but do you need the ‘benefits’ that this program provides?