If you’re not familiar with dark social, it might sound dangerous to you. It might remind you of malicious internet terminologies such as the dark web. But this term Dark Social refers to the traffic you receive on your website from which you can not identify its origin.

Dark Social is one of the issues that most marketers do not touch. Some of the reasons why it is ignored are:

1) It is difficult to quantify effectively.

2) They have a level of complexity greater than other conflicts of digital marketing.

3) The information available is somewhat limited.

Anyway, this should not stop us since the issue is getting stronger every year. And we have to ask ourselves: How many times have we not shared a link to an article among our WhatsApp/Viber contacts?

One of the strongest arguments around the dark social is that, if we know the source of traffic we can optimize the content to make it easier to share. Imagine that you manage the content marketing strategy for a web newspaper, and one of your articles is a survey to see which URL Shortener people like most. It is likely that many people might do the survey and want their friends to do it too, but they would not be willing to post the link on their social networks because URL Shortener is not something to share on social media. We know that these people will share the article through personal messaging apps like WeChat/WhatsApp/Viber, that’s when the Social Dark takes on more influence. If we optimize the images of our publications we could improve the experience of our users within these applications.

According to the web last year, the share of URLs by dark social was more than 70% globally. The fact that this is a growing phenomenon should encourage us to modify our publication practices and take them into account.

This trend has a greater impact on some industries. For example in the tourism industry, it is estimated that 70% of the traffic to each website comes from a dark social source. Therefore you can not ignore it, especially if you are in this sector or in some way: finance, food, executive search, among others.

Among the actions you can use to take advantage of the dark social are: Shorten your URLs (that you can do from the T2M URL Shortener platform in any of our packages), optimize your content for mobile experiences, and even use a specialized monitoring platform for this type of traffic channels.