CMO Strategies: Inside Reddit, Pinterest and Snapchat’s efforts to court marketers

Pinterest, Reddit and Snapchat all saw increased marketer usage in 2024, according to Modern Retail+ Research’s survey. Pinterest usage increased by 7 percentage points, while Reddit and Snapchat’s usage both grew by 5 percentage points respectively. All three platforms are likely to have benefitted from the drop-off in marketers’ usage of TikTok and X as advertisers have sought to diversify their investments and address brand safety issues. But Pinterest, Reddit and Snapchat have also made concerted efforts to grow their ad revenue over the past year.

Snap spent the first quarter of 2024 working to woo advertisers with improved ad products, deals and discounts to incentivize them to try new features, and a new brand campaign to tout those offerings to consumers and marketers. Snap’s ad business raked in nearly $1.2 billion in Q1 2024, following the $1.36 billion it brought in during Q4 2023 and the $1.19 billion it brought in during Q3 2023.

“Now, with the TikTok uncertainty, people are looking for, ‘Where are other places that maybe I haven’t invested as much of my time,’” said Patrick Harris, president of the Americas at Snap. “But knowing when they do invest that time, that they’re able to see returns that are consistent and can help meaningfully continue to move and grow their businesses. That’s the journey that we’re on.”

Reddit went public in March and has big plans for its search ad business. On its recent earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman highlighted the platform’s substantial volume of over a billion search queries per month, suggesting that serving ads against these results would be inevitable. It’s a similar story with video, as Reddit transitions from its origins as a text-based social platform to a more visually-oriented one, aligning with the trends of platforms centered around images, short clips and livestreaming.

“Making a mixed media feed work really well with text and links that can hold their own alongside video and gifs is really important to us,” Huffman said. “I think we’ve made some progress but I also think there’s plenty of room for improvement there.”

For years, Pinterest has tried to fashion itself as a safe haven for people looking to escape the bombast of social media, but Pinterest has also seen itself as a platform that can effectively target and engage users at various stages of the marketing funnel. 

Now it wants marketers to see the platform in the same way. Pinterest’s main pitch deck for 2023 boldly touted the platform’s mission: “To bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love.” The pitch deck also highlighted that nine out of 10 users say Pinterest is an online oasis. 

The messaging is working for some agencies and clients. Adam Telian, vp of performance marketing at New Engen said that in the last few months between 20% and 25% of the agency’s clients have been active on Pinterest. “We’re recommending it for a couple of campaigns that we’re working on right now,” Telian added. “Our rationale was, it’s not a place to doom scroll. You go there for a specific reason. And the campaigns that we’re planning are driven by a need for creative inspiration.”

This year, impressions greatly increased in importance as a success metric marketers consider across Pinterest, Snapchat, X and Reddit, according to Modern Retail’s survey. Marketers’ usage of impressions grew by 22 percentage points on Pinterest, by 17 percentage points on Snapchat, and by 10 percentage points on X. On Reddit, impressions appeared as a success metric for the first time.

For these platforms, rather than measuring engagement by the amount of likes or shares a brand or sponsored influencer’s post receives, engagement is most valuable in the form of conversations among users. Notably here, a successful engagement would be a positive mention of a brand. 

Because Snapchat focuses on viewable content, it makes sense that impressions would greatly matter on the platform. On X, however, impressions tied with engagement as the top success metric largely because the percentage of marketers who said they use engagement to measure success dropped significantly from 50% of respondents last year to 33% of respondents this year. This is likely because turmoil at X under Musk’s leadership, along with X’s recent rule change to allow explicit pornography, and an uptick in politically divisive content has driven some users away, making engagement a less important measurement of success for marketers. 

A report from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower found that X had 27 million daily active users of its mobile app in the U.S. in February 2024, as reported by NBC News. However, X refuted that statistic, noting that the platform’s monthly active user count had increased by 6% year over year to reach 570 million people as of the second quarter of 2024. 

Impressions also appeared in Modern Retail’s survey results as a success metric marketers consider on Reddit for the first time this year. Similar to X, this may be because users come to the platform seeking information about a specific area of interest and may only read through content rather than commenting on it or otherwise engaging with it. Additionally, the fact that Reddit went public this year may have brought more readers to the platform, contributing to the importance of impressions as a success metric for marketers. 

“The main KPI we’re currently monitoring [on social campaigns] is impressions,” Natalie Sexton, vp of marketing at Natalie’s Juice, said in an email to Modern Retail. “As a company with nationwide reach, we use impressions to gauge our general reach with localized influencers in key markets we’re looking to expand our presence and bolster brand awareness.”

But engagement remains top of mind for the juice maker as well. “Engagement allows us to dig into specific measures, like post saves and shares, across campaigns,” Sexton added. “These insights also allow us to gauge the types of content themes that resonate best with our community — are users engaged with a specific product we’re featuring or a style of recipe? … Our goal is to always assess our metrics beyond what can be considered ‘vanity metrics’ and instead look at what is getting our customer base, both current and potential, excited.”

Duolingo’s Orssaud said impressions are a key success metric for his company across social platforms. “The way we measure social across the different channels, whether there’s Twitter [X], Instagram, YouTube or Tik Tok, is really through the same means. We really care about organic social impressions because we believe that, at the core, that’s what ties the KPIs and really helps us understand the true performance of any content or campaigns,” Orssaud said.

For the second year in a row, cost of acquisition is marketers’ biggest challenge on most legacy social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. It is also a common concern for marketers across other media channels. When looking at the marketing mix as a whole, including retail media, display ads and ad-supported streaming, cost of media is the most common challenge marketers reported across all channels, Modern Retail’s survey found.

This year’s survey included new responses, such as lack of consumer interest and lack of expertise, to gauge marketers’ main challenges on social media platforms. However, even with the new options factored in, cost of media remained the biggest challenge marketers said they face with social media platforms.

Some respondents did note new challenges this year, in particular on Facebook and TikTok. Newly added lack of consumer interest was marketers’ second-most important concern on Facebook, with nearly a quarter of respondents (20%) selecting this option. This is likely due to Facebook’s aforementioned aging user base and its inability, thus far, to attract and retain users from younger generations. Although, that may change with Facebook’s new plan to appeal to Gen Z. 

Interestingly, lack of resources and content demands — also a newly added response option — jumped to the forefront of marketers’ concerns when it came to TikTok. Twenty-three percent of respondents said they face lack of resources and content demands on TikTok. Because TikTok is a faster-paced platform it needs a steady supply of fresh content, and some advertisers struggle to meet those needs. 

Automaker Hyundai is tapping into creator content to keep up with that demand. “Content stays live until the moment it fatigues,” Hyundai’s Zepeda said. “We allow the audience to indicate when that moment is and are led by users’ behaviors on the platforms. We also have made a major pivot and leaned into creator and influencer content. To keep our social presence populated enough to keep up with the pace, not everything can have a major production schedule and creators and influencers have helped us solve that.”

Natalie’s Juice has also added more creator content to keep up with consumer trends and to supply new images and videos for its social feeds. “Finding new ways to keep our content engaging and unique on Instagram and TikTok was a challenge for us until we leaned more into UGC from our fans and partners,” Sexton said. “By working with new partners, we’ve not only been able to expand the type of content created, which we then share on our social media pages, but tap into new creator communities with collaboration posts and/or paid partnership ads to help further our reach.”

As noted earlier in regard to YouTube, brand safety is a top concern for marketers on platforms that rely on UGC. Brands have less control in UGC-based environments because of the emphasis on and foregrounding of content creators’ unfiltered opinions and comments. Forty-one percent of marketers said brand safety is the main concern they face on X. It was also the second-largest concern for marketers on Snapchat and TikTok (14% of respondents on each platform respectively).

A slew of advertisers have either paused ad spend or stopped investing in and posting their own organic content on X in light of brand safety concerns. Toyota, Coca-Cola, Apple and Starbucks all ceased organic activity on the platform last year. For some marketers, ad spending pause or platform abandonment has reached beyond organic content and into paid content. Hyundai paused ad spend on the platform after a sponsored post was spotted next to antisemitic content.

“No serious management team of a major advertiser would condone their head of advertising putting their brand at great risk by endorsing the behaviors of the platform’s current owner with their advertising investment,” said Lou Paskalis, CEO and founder of AJL Advisory. “Unlike when it was called Twitter, the platform no longer offers advertisers anything that they can’t find elsewhere in today’s advertising marketplace.”

Katie Williams, U.S. CMO at consumer health care company Haleon, said in an email interview with Modern Retail that Haleon strives to curate the right balance of brand and creator content on social media. “Marketers have to learn to relinquish control of our brands to help tell the story in ways that are most relevant to our consumers and in the places where they are most comfortable interacting and learning about brands,” Williams said. “Take our Sensodyne brand, for example. The influencers and creators we work with look different than typical CPG brands. We leverage real dental professionals because we have a responsibility to ensure the content we create, and share comes from trusted voices.”

Duolingo, which is known for its “Evil Duolingo Owl” mascot, takes a much looser approach. “We’re not obsessed about control. You can’t be authentic if you build too much control around your brand,” Duolingo’s Orssaud said. “Most of our ideas for content and campaigns on social media come from our community, so we have a very self deprecating sense of humor about our brand. … In some ways, we give ourselves permission to be unhinged, and to be funny, because our community has given us permission and that’s what makes our content authentic and fun.” Orssaud noted that the company does have guidelines around topics that it considers off limits, such as drugs and violence. 

On smaller platforms like Snapchat, Reddit and Pinterest, marketers find lack of scale to be the largest hurdle they face, according to Modern Retail’s survey. Thirty-six percent of marketers said lack of scale was their biggest challenge on Snapchat, 35% said the same for Reddit and 20% said so about Pinterest. Many UGC-focused platforms, like these three, lack scale since the platforms place an emphasis on users engaging with each other, rather than promoting passive content consumption. On these platforms, there’s a greater necessity for content that generates interaction and discourse, and brands that tend to post only curated visuals often struggle to gain enough engagement on them because their posts don’t feel organic within these environments. 

Additionally, with consumers leading the discussion and trends on UGC platforms, companies tend to go along with trends rather than creating them, which often leads them to a reactive strategy rather than a proactive one. 

Joe Milano, svp of digital at Tapestry, the luxury fashion holding company that owns Coach and Kate Spade New York, said marketers must be strategic about the type of content they create and share to each platform. “At the end of the day, it is about generating engagement,” Milano said. “Anybody can generate a lot of content. The key is, how do you generate the right content for the right platform and the right audience?”

“If you don’t answer those questions first, then you’re going backward in time and just generating content that you want to share,” he added. “You’re not necessarily being thoughtful about how it should be shared [and] into what audience.”

• Pinterest, Reddit and Snapchat have all made concerted efforts to attract marketers and grow ad revenue over the past year. Reddit has touted its search ad business, Snapchat has improved its ad products and Pinterest is promoting itself as an online oasis for consumers.
  
• Cost of acquisition remains marketers’ biggest challenge on most legacy social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube — a common concern across media channels.
  
• Lack of consumer interest is a new concern for marketers on Facebook, while lack of resources and content demands is a new concern on TikTok. Marketers are leaning into creator content to bulk up their offerings, but they must grapple with brand safety concerns on UGC-focused platforms where brands have less control because of the emphasis on content creators’ unfiltered opinions and comments.
  
• Marketers said lack of scale is the largest hurdle they face on Snapchat, Reddit and Pinterest. Many UGC-focused platforms lack scale since the platforms place an emphasis on users engaging with each other, rather than promoting passive content consumption.