What is Dark Social?

Dark Social is nothing but the social sharing that cannot be accurately tracked by web analytics platforms.

Today, when someone clicks a link to your site from any social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, your analytics platform can exactly track the traffic. But what if someone clicks a link that is sent to them over WhatsApp or Snapchat?

Large number of people do this every day. They send lots of traffic to publishers, but the links shared lack the referral tags and are collectively showed up as ‘Direct Traffic’ which is really unfair because it is not really direct traffic, i.e. it’s highly thinkable that will someone really type <link> in the browser?

Some of the channels that brings us the dark social traffic:

1. Mobile Apps such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram etc.
2. E-mails
3. Messaging Apps like WeChat, Mobile Messages, ChatOn etc.
4. Secure Browsing- The referral won’t be passed on if you click on HTTPS from HTTP.

Reasons why your company cares about dark social:

1. Dark Social is everywhere: For quite a few years now, the majority of click backs to dark social shares have come from mobile devices. Clicks from dark social shares coming from mobile devices was 62% in February 2016 which increased approximately up to 70% in 2018. The remaining percentile of clicks come from desktops.
2. It has a huge impact on traffic: According to RadiumOne (Marketing firm), dark social shares jumped from 62% to 84% globally. When we compare those numbers to Facebook Traffic, we can find only 11% of site-originated shares & 21% of mobile clicks happens worldwide via Facebook. At the same time, seven times the number of site-originated mobile shares & almost more than three times the number of mobile clicks happened via dark social.
3. Spectacular marketing opportunity: As dark social gives a detailed information of consumers’ interests, familiarising yourself with this information will, for sure, allow your business to target the audience who are connected to your brand in some or the other way.
4. Dark Social reaches unique demographics: According to RadiumOne’s research, around 46% people above 55 years of age share only via dark social as compared to those in the 16 to 34 age group, where only 19% do so.
5. Wide-spread in many industries: Dark social is somewhat similar to word-of-mouth publicity. According to stats, if you have business in finance, food & drink, travel or maybe executive search, more than 70% of social sharing is done through dark social.

How can you measure Dark Social?

For anyone who is publishing some content online, it becomes important for him to know where their readers or major traffic is coming from. Indeed, measuring dark social should be made very important part of your social media return on investment framework. Some of the tactics and tools that you can use to measure dark social are explained below.

1. Keep sharing easy: Keep sharing buttons on your website thoughtfully arranged so the visitors can spot them easily. The experience of your content & share buttons shall match.
2. Shorten URLs: You can also start using shortened URLs for outbound links in your content; which can give you deeper analysis of the engagement rate. Platforms like twitter prefer shorter links.
3. Use dark social tools: A variety of tools are available for marketing professionals that enable the tracking of dark social traffic origins and their outcomes.

• Posting a product of ‘RadiumOne’ allows the users to share content and also provides with unique dark social analytics tools.
• ‘ShareThis’ is another excellent tool that enables users to share any piece of content that is available on web through email, direct messaging apps or text message. This tool can be customized to measure the number of copy and shares of your web URL.
• ‘GetSocial.io’ is yet another social media app store. You can easily create an account through their official website or download their WordPress plugin. After you’ve created an account, you are required to paste the snippet of the code provided into your HTML <head> section. Once you have done that, you will be just a click away to track dark social shares. Find the Address Bar Tracking app, click activate and you are good to go.

4. Watch other social media platforms: One of the things to unmask the origin of dark social traffic is to watch out other social media platforms. Check for the simultaneous spike in link traffic coming from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc.

To sum up, the best way to ensure that your content gets shared is to create informative original and interesting material. Now that you know all about dark social and the tricks to measure it, you are ready to improve your social media ROI.