Dark Social - What is it, and why does it matter? 

Dark Social Sharing is a topic that pops up among marketers from time to time. In a way, we fight against it, but we are also with it. The most beneficial thing would be for people to share content on public social media channels, where it would reach more people at a time. 

On the other hand, content shared on Dark Social means almost guaranteed traffic to the shared destination, which, when correctly done it will generate value for marketing. The concept of ‘dark social’ first appeared in an article in The Atlantic magazine in 2012. The article by Alexis Madrigal argues that 69% of all content sharing takes place outside of social media channels. Today, this figure is 84%, thanks to the growing popularity of various instant messaging channels

Dark Social happens on mobile.

Imagine you are reading this blog post and, finding it interesting and informative, decide to share it. Most likely, you won’t share it on Facebook or LinkedIn. Instead, you put it in your workplace chat, email, or WhatsApp group. This is what dark social actually means: content that’s shared outside of social media channels.

Most interestingly and importantly for marketers, 62% of the clicks from shared content were from mobile. Mobile-optimized campaigns and ads are state of the art in digital marketing and should certainly not be overlooked.

The importance of mobile platforms is also emphasized by the traffic figures from dark social channels. With 67% of clicks coming from mobile, we can conclude that the amount of content shared via email is significantly less than content shared on mobile apps. 

We can take advantage of this by creating shorter links that look better on mobile and optimizing headlines and images to be as clickable as possible. To encourage mobile sharing, it’s essential that people can easily share the content from their phones. 

In addition to the “Share on Facebook” buttons, advertisers can also use a “Share on WhatsApp” button to facilitate mobile sharing.

What cannot be measured does not exist

We marketers like measurability. We measure Google traffic, campaign click-through rates, Facebook reach, and anything else we can measure and use to our advantage. Yet we often fail to consider dark social shares, which we could measure almost as well. 

We can use this measurability to target and optimize our marketing, for example, by increasing the amount of mobile-only content for high traffic from non-social media channels.

By measuring traffic from dark social channels, we can better optimize our marketing and provide better data for ourselves and our customers on how their marketing campaign is performing. 

It seems that in the future, it will no longer be enough to look at traditional social media traffic alone: we need to include traffic from dark social channels to get an accurate picture of marketing effectiveness.

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