Dark Social

Dark social is a term that refers to the sharing of content through private channels of which Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and e-mail traffic are the most well-known examples. Dark social can thus be described as a form of referral traffic that can be targeted to a specific organization's offerings. However, the specific feature of dark social is that it is sharing actions that you cannot see and measure. After all, it is not insightful for an organization when people write via WhatsApp or another social media channel, for example, how well or how poorly an offer is perceived. Even an interesting ad found on the Internet and shared via email is a sharing action that falls under the heading of dark social. After all, the company in question cannot see that the link has been copied and shared through another medium.

Many studies show that a very large number of partial actions are "dark." For companies, it is good to realize that these kinds of partial promotions do have a lot of value. After all, an offer is brought to the attention of an acquaintance in the most personal way possible. Therefore, the impact of this untraceable traffic is much greater than an impersonal message or a general recommendation. This is the reason why many companies focus on fleshing out a dark social strategy to generate maximum results from it. This can be generated, among other things, by visibly placing share buttons for dark social, being frequently active on these kinds of channels yourself and by providing all social media buttons with UTM tags that make the results visible in Google Analytics. It is good to mention for the sake of completeness that dark social should definitely not be confused with the use of dark web. These terms have nothing to do with each other. After all, dark social is a completely legal way of communicating.