The popularity of Facebook Messenger and several other messaging apps means that companies are having a harder time quantifying their online traffic.
A study by RhythmOne found that 84 percent of business content sharing happened through untrackable platforms, including 36 percent via mobile devices. Such platforms are known as dark social and have caused marketers to rethink how they draw traffic to their websites.
This does not translate to sales for a business. The shared information comes from a trusted source like friends or family, who don’t have a vested interest in selling a product or service.
“Private communities are not a replacement for public social networks, and they aren’t typically about acquiring customers,” said Christopher Penn, co-founder and chief data scientist at Trust Insights.
Penn and his team’s report, “Social Networks 2020,” found that the risk of dark social requires businesses to rethink how they engage online. Rather than using influencers to promote their products, they should use ambassadors.
“As public social media continues to encounter issues and decline in some senses, as trust erodes, particularly in the Facebook ecosystem, more people want to move to those private communities—Slack, Discord [gaming], LinkedIn groups, etc. And, in order to get into those communities, one of the things we have to do is find people who can invite us,” he said.
Penn added that influencers and current employees could invite a representative from the company into a private community. If asking an employee to vouch for a company in a “velvet rope” community, new process-based metrics need to be used to measure success, such as weekly discussion participation rates.
Once a business has learned about dark social and is trying to join private groups, it can begin analyzing traffic from private groups.
Disruptive Advertising suggests companies use tools like Google Analytics Dark Social Calculator to collect data directly from a business’ Google account to determine how much traffic comes from previously untraceable shares.
In addition to the calculator, businesses can look for spikes in online traffic to particular webpages month to month. They can also court dark social by making their content user-friendly for message sharing. This can be accomplished by making websites operational on mobile devices, creating an inviting and informal environment where people can ask questions and have a general conversation.
The rise of dark social and its effects on business lead to questions of how inclusive social media is and will be in the future. Will Facebook and similar websites become less inclusive to compete with private communities?
Michele Cuthbert is the CEO and creator of Baker Creative, a global WBE-certified creative brand management firm based in Ohio.
