Michelle Goodall, Chief Marketing Officer at Guild, a platform for building professional digital communities, acknowledged that the situation is a “delicate” one, with neither Love Island nor Reddit having “trodden particularly lightly” or perhaps working closely enough with the community’s moderators and founders. However, she doesn’t foresee many of the community’s members abandoning it altogether: “Perhaps they might peel off and create a new subreddit if the exclusive content isn’t a valuable enough exchange and the shape of the community changes with a new influx of members.”
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
More importantly, said Goodall, the situation serves as a “clear warning” to brands and businesses working with organically-created communities “that the collective ‘we’ can be a powerful force if they feel marginalised in decision making about their grassroots community.” Above all else, she emphasised a people-oriented approach. “It’s unlikely that every member of a community will accept commercial deals, regardless of whether that community is on Reddit, Discord, Guild or elsewhere, but I can’t stress how important it is to apply a very different approach to community than you would with straight up media deals. As with influencer marketing/working with creators, it’s “people not platforms”.”
Ultimately, the r/LoveIslandTV community seems to have survived these bumps in the road with the subreddit settling into its excitement for the upcoming season. However, it’s clear that the approach to introducing an official presence into the sub could have benefited from more research, planning, and a tailored strategy for interacting with Reddit. While some of the interactions from the u/LoveIsland official account have been well-received, others continue to be perceived as too promotional and met with cynicism and low engagement, with users expressing scepticism as to whether the account managers are familiar with Reddit.
Although the subreddit’s community is large and well-established enough that members are unlikely to leave, these missteps represent a missed opportunity for ITV and Love Island to engage closely with fans of the show and learn from their suggestions and feedback – as well as being seen to be open to engagement and input from fans.
For businesses who want to branch out to a new platform or market to an established fan community, this underscores the importance of becoming familiar with that platform or community and its members before marketing to them; and of applying that understanding in a dedicated strategy – one with the flexibility to adapt and change tack if things don’t work out as planned.Seven examples of brands engaging in social commerce
As Accenture states in its ‘Future of Shopping‘ report: “Rather than a handful of big retailers and brands selling to mass markets of millions, we’re now seeing millions of individuals and smaller businesses selling to one another within a vast social commerce ecosystem.”