How Marketers Can Penetrate the Secrets of Dark Social

 

“Dark” means the unknown. Dark social constitutes the unknown data in social media measurement.

It’s only recently that innovative brands are beginning to bring some light into and measure the vast trove of dark social data.

A term coined by the Atlantic in 2012, dark social covers communications shared through chat, messaging apps and email. Unlike messages shared on social media networks, dark social is difficult to track.

It’s also enormous. Sharing through dark social is three times larger than sharing through Facebook, according to a study by RadiumOne, The Light and Dark of Social Sharing.

Marketers naturally want to know what websites send them the most traffic in order to pursue the best referral sites and to improve or abandon unsuccessful marketing strategies. That’s not easy in the dark social realm where traditional web analytics don’t exist.

A Huge Potential for Marketers

The measurement potential of dark social is as enormous as the amount of data.

“Dark Social as a marketing opportunity is one of the most exciting and potentially lucrative opportunities available to marketers today,” states the RadiumOne study. “Harnessing and acting on Dark Social data presents a tremendous opportunity for advertisers and publishers to significantly improve the return on investment from their social media and digital marketing investments.”

The study, which analyzed online sharing data of RadiumOne’s Po.st Sharing Widgets and surveyed 9,027 online consumers, reveals that:

• 69 percent of all online sharing is done through dark social, 23% is done on Facebook, and 10 percent is through all other social channels combined,

• 84% of people globally share content online,

• 32% of people who share content online only share via dark social,

• 36% of dark social sharing globally takes place on mobile devices.

Case Studies of Dark Social Success

Marketers can use link-shortening tools to create trackable links that gather audience data, although few take advantage of the data obtained.

San Francisco chocolate vendor Ghirardelli got a taste of the power of dark social when it embedded social sharing buttons with trackable links on its recipes and tips on its website.

To its surprise, it learned that 84% of all their shares were sent through dark social. Armed with its new data, it targeted audiences who either clicked or shared content and improved its media investment by over 600%.

Team Sky, Great Britain’s first professional road racing team, used link shorteners to track content interaction and understand how audiences consume and share content during major cycling tours like Tour de France.

It found that 95% of its content was shared through dark social and only 5% through Facebook and Twitter. It used its insights to help its team and commercial partners to deliver better content, increase engagement and decrease acquisition costs.

Beware of Misleading Web Analytics

Web analytics tools typically report incoming traffic from dark social as unknown or direct traffic, Mark Josephson, CEO of Bitly, told Direct Marketing News. That inaccurate information can prompt marketers to invest in the wrong channels.

To take advantage of dark social, Josephson and other digital marketing experts, urge marketers to aggressively measure everything.

“Start by tracking what you do know. Then learn what portion is coming from places that you either don’t know or simply can’t explain,” he advises. “Then use third-party, independent tools to troubleshoot, fix bugs, and follow every link back to its source. If you’re not measuring performance then you can’t unlock anything; you can’t improve anything or grow. Start innovating, and that’s when you’ll be able to activate dark social.”

Bottom Line: Dark social, or email, chat and messaging apps, is difficult to monitor and measure through standard web analytics. Pioneering brands now use trackable links in their social messages to pierce the dark social veil and collect valuable data to improve their content and better target their audiences.