Staying in the loop and ahead of trends is especially important for digital marketing, but not every trend is as apparent as the next.
“Dark social” is one such example; it is an elusive trend making a big impact from behind the scenes.
It might sound like little more than a mysterious buzzword, but dark social is the modern equivalent of word-of-mouth, which has always been core to marketing efforts.
As content sharing is key to digital marketing, analytics play a huge role, but Dark Social is missed by traditional analytics, and so ignoring its impact is a marketing mistake.
Understanding it can help uncover important missing factors, so let’s discuss what it is and why it shouldn’t be ignored.
Image source:https://www.vecteezy.com/vector-art/152203-linear-photography-icons
Dark Social: An Invisibly Shared Web
Marketers need to understand what it is and how it differs from other types of sharing.
Dark Social Explained
So, what is Dark Social? While the name is particularly ominous, it is simply content sharing through private means.
Messaging directly between friends on chat apps instead of hitting send directly from one social platform to another makes content trickier to track.
Web analytics are a backbone tool for marketing, but when a digital footprint is less visible, the origin of a click or traffic spike is harder to find.
Dark Social Examples
The majority of us use dark social methods without realising we are participating in the trend.
Dark social is just the sharing of content via a private or closed network.
Anytime the visible share buttons are bypassed, it is essentially dark social participation.
Maybe you have copied an article link from the address bar and texted it to a buddy, or perhaps forwarded an email to a coworker.
Why Dark Social Matters
Understanding customer behaviour is crucial for marketing, and dark social interactions are not dashboard data. Many marketers underestimate its importance, but by understanding it well, you soon see how much it matters; the picture captured of users has a big chunk missing.
Dark Social Traffic: Surprising Size and Scale
The majority of social sharing (80%) is through Dark Social channels.
This means on average more than half of your content’s shares could be left unmeasured, making mapping out a customer’s journey accurately, next to impossible.
The Effects of Dark Social on Attribution and ROI
Understanding where traffic originates and what influences your customers is essential marketing attribution data. With dark social at play, large portions of your traffic may be hidden or mislabeled.
This means that ROI calculations can suffer, so can your content strategy. It is hard to judge how well a campaign is doing if it might be thriving on unseen channels.
Dark Social Detection & Leverage
While dark social interactions are difficult to track, with the right strategy, you can use them to your advantage.
Techniques for Tracking and Using Smart URLS
By using trackable URLS and UTMS, you can identify where your links are being shared. Tools such as Bitly can also shed more light on content performance, even if it is being shared privately.
Encouraging Shareable Content
You can also tailor your content to encourage dark social sharing. Short, compelling headlines and interesting facts and statistics that are easy to copy and paste do particularly well.
People also love to share content that resonates, so emotionally compelling content is also likely to get passed along in personal messages, emails, and private forums.
Analytics Advice
Some online tools can help detect where dark social sharing is taking place. It will never fully illuminate the traffic, but it can give clues.
When you look at your direct traffic, sift by page type. Homepages, landing pages, and blog articles marked as “direct” are probably dark social visits as people rarely type these things manually.
You can also compare patterns between direct sources and trackable social media traffic.
Practical Implications for Modern Marketing
However subtle, dark social has an influence, mainly affecting customer journeys. If marketers want to stay ahead, they have to accept that much engagement happens privately, highlighting the importance of trust.
Customer Journey Takeaways
One thing is for sure: tracking consumer engagement is tougher than ever. As users move between private chat apps, emails, and browsers on multiple devices, simple metrics don’t serve as well as they might.
Internet users are savvy; some use blockers, others use virtual private networks, and hide their IP addresses. They are data-conscious and learning. “What is my IP number?” is a common question people ask in recent years.
Multiple device use is muddying the analytical water.
The Importance of Trust
Another important note, for leveraging dark social trends, is to focus on trustworthy content; people don’t tend to privately share anything they don’t feel is a trustworthy source.
The same can be said about content quality.
Ultimately, you don’t need to track every engagement, you merely need to inspire more sharing!.
Conclusion
Internet users are savvier than ever, many feel their infringed upon as apps nd sites integrate across devices. Private communication is becoming favoured as the new norm, and dark social trends are likely to grow.
Marketers need to accept and understand that not all traffic is measurable transparently.
However, with that in mind and a few strategies for tailoring content to leverage this invisible engagement, they can still adapt and market accordingly. It seems authentic interactions are resonating mostly in the shadows.