How Can You Leverage Dark Social In Your Social Media Strategy?
- What is Dark Social?
- Do you want to know how to start using dark social to your advantage?
Welcome to the dark side! Did you know that approximately 77% of content is being shared via dark social! That’s a lot of content being passed that many marketers are simply ignoring. Instead, let’s consider what dark social is today and how we might be able to use it instead!
What is Dark Social?
Dark social is a term that refers to any web traffic that is not connected directly with a known source, such as a Google link or social media sites. The original click to go over to your site is unknown because there are no referral tags connected to it.
When you click on any link from Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. to get over to the original article or content, a referral tag (known as a UTM code) is attached to that action, signaling to things like Google Analytics or other web tracking that the traffic was prompted by that Facebook or LinkedIn post.
If the stat above is true, then we are not accurately tracking the majority of our social media traffic, and therefore our reports are only telling part of the story! Yikes! That’s a lot of potential return on investment proof that we are missing out whether we are reporting to a client, or we are the client ourselves.
What Does Dark Social Look Like?
Here are a few tangible examples of what dark social looks like. As social media evolves and changes, new forms of dark social will evolve, but hopefully this list gives you an idea of what it is.
- “Sharing” a link via the messenger app to a friend. Perhaps it’s related to a topic that is more private in nature, or you simply like messaging it rather than posting it to a news feed. Either way, it’s a link sent through a messenger app, Facebook or otherwise.
- Emailing a link to a friend. Similar to using a messenger app, but here you copy the link via social and email it instead.
- Clicking on links from Slack or Google Hangouts.
- Browsing using a https or private browser. If you’ve selected private viewing, your website traffic won’t translate over to web analytics programs.
- Sharing links via Snapchat or Whatsapp.
So, What Can Social Media Marketers Leveraging Dark Social Do?
Clearly, our analytics are missing some core stats, which makes reporting a little difficult. It can feel overwhelming to deal with something that you don’t really understand, nor understand just how big of an impact it makes! Even with the little bit we know about dark social so far, there are a few practical things you can do to leverage dark social for your benefit.
Know Your Overall Strategies
Look at the pages your traffic IS landing on. If your blog posts, content pages, or landing pages you’ve created are getting heavy, consistent “direct” traffic, odds are a good chunk of that traffic is due to your social media strategy. Educating your client is important here on the stats of how much traffic is known to be dark social in general. While some of this traffic could be coming from other sources like email newsletters, SEO, or other sources, if you know what the overall marketing strategies are, you can get a good idea about how many sources are pushing people to these specific blogs or landing pages.
Create Great Content.
As we’ve been saying for years, create good content and people will come. Be consistent and helpful, and your stuff will get shared. Simple. As. That. If you aren’t creating content, though, you don’t have any links for people to share via dark social any way you put it. However, if you are creating and spreading the word about your awesome content, others will follow suit and share it as well!
Make It Easy To Share
Always add easy “click to share” buttons on your website. Make it easy to let others share your content WITH the UTM code that will track the share. If you don’t have these click to share icons, users are more like to go up to the browser bar and copy/paste the url. When they do that, they are more likely to share the link via a dark social way. However, the easy click to share buttons make it simple and easy for them to share the page’s content in a way that lets you track more accurately.
At the point, there’s still a lot we can’t do with dark social. We know it exists and we know it’s very powerful, but we can’t accurately track it in a meaningful way. It is an important topic, though, to have on your radar. You can help inform your social media metrics in a more realistic way, and also be aware of any new advances and opportunities in dark social in the near future.