Reddit is making it easier for brands to manage their presence on its platform.

Through a deal with social marketing platform Sprinklr, brands can now use Sprinklr to publish comments to Reddit’s topic-based forums, or “subreddits,” as well as to manage the private messages they receive from Reddit’s users, the companies announced on Thursday.

Sprinklr’s integration with Reddit marks the first time that brands are able to publish to Reddit through a third-party social marketing platform, a Reddit spokesperson confirmed. Previously, to publish a comment to a subreddit or to exchange private messages with a Reddit user, brands had to use Reddit’s site or apps like anyone else.

Reddit’s integration with Sprinklr represents the latest milestone in the company’s efforts to make its platform more palatable to marketers. Over the past two years, it has whitelisted subreddits to ensure brand safety for advertisers, adopted interest-based targeting, updated its self-serve ad-buying tool and, by the end of this year, will make profile pages more widely available to marketers.

By enabling brands to run their Reddit accounts through the same tool they may use to manage their accounts on other social platforms, Reddit lowers the barrier for brands to use its platform and raises the likelihood that they will invest in it.

“This integration takes a process that was previously time consuming and siloed — accessing Reddit data, sending Reddit messages and publishing to subreddits — and simplifies it so companies can centralize customer engagements across social media channels on one platform,” said Sprinklr’s VP and Global Head of Product Evangelism Elizabeth Closmore in a statement.

In addition to being able to publish to Reddit through Sprinklr, brands will be able to access historical and real-time data from Reddit. That data may be uniquely valuable. As 22squared’s Executive VP and Director of Partnerships and Content Marketing Chris Tuff recently said, Reddit is “the backbone of the internet in terms of surfacing what most people end up seeing [on other platforms] with a day-and-a-half delay.” Now that brands can more easily monitor what people are talking about on Reddit, they may be better positioned to identify trends and incorporate them into their marketing.

It’s also important that brands will be able to access Reddit’s data through the same marketing tool they can use to act on that data. Given Reddit users’ reputation for speaking their minds and Reddit’s reputation for influencing online conversation, brands may be able to get out ahead of any negative issues. For example, if Reddit users begin to complain about a brand’s product or other business moves, the brand can identify those complaints through Sprinklr and use Sprinklr to respond to those complaints on Reddit. Of course, that can backfire, as Electronic Arts demonstrated last month.

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