What is Dark Social Marketing & Why Is It So Important?
Dark Social marketing is the most important invisible marketing channel that no one knows about. Dark Social accounts for 84% of all referred traffic to a website, and you’re probably not measuring any of it. This article will help you learn more about what Dark Social sharing is, as well as how to measure it.
What is Dark Social?
It’s a simple idea. A Dark Social share happens when a visitor to a website shares a link to a page with someone else using social media. This isn’t them clicking on an ad or finding a website naturally using Google. Dark Social shares are created through channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or WhatsApp. They don’t have to be a post on a wall or a tweet from an account, the vast majority of shares happen in direct messages on all these platforms.
A simple example of Dark Social sharing would be going onto a website like eBay and finding a product you know your friend would like. Because you’re a good person, you decide to let your friend know that you’ve found the product they might like to get. Rather than calling them and describing how you found the product, you simply copy the url of the product page and send it to your friend. When they click the link and buy the product – eBay just gets a new customer for free. They didn’t have to spend a single penny to acquire a new customer. This is what makes Dark Social so powerful.
How Is Dark Social Measured?
Not very well, yet.
The current methods of Dark Social analytics are effectively done by a process of elimination. Analytics tools like Google Ads or similar tools can tell you how much of your traffic came from advertising or organic search engine sources.
Knowing the above two, tools just lump all other ‘unexplainable’ traffic into the Dark Social bucket. There is little to no ability to do anything with this information.
Some services offer specialized share buttons that will know when someone clicked it and reused the link. The problem with this is that 99.8%2 of website traffic never touches any share buttons. This tells us that most Dark Social sharing is done through link sharing.
How can SociFind Help?
SociFind will be the first tool that allows website owners to fully track, analyse and capitalize on Dark Social sharing through any and all dark channels.
Our solution will allow all websites to find all dark social shares for their website, and create micro-influencers from their visitors. It will be GDPR compliant all the way through.
We'll be ready to release soon so keep up to date with SociFind by registering interest here!