As budgets tighten in 2024, marketing teams are under extra scrutiny to prove their work is contributing to the bottom line. One area that marketers cannot ignore is the dark side of social media.according to Captera researchMarketers say nearly half of their brand's web traffic can come from dark social channels.
Dark social media refers to sharing content privately through channels such as Facebook groups, Instagram DMs, and WhatsApp messages. As consumers become more wary of their privacy online, they are turning to closed spaces to share content and engage. These important factors have led to an increase in underground social activities.
Marketers may be missing out on important conversations about their brand by not leveraging the shadowy activities of social media to their advantage. Capturing and identifying dark social traffic is a great opportunity for marketers to demonstrate their value.
Here's how to embrace dark social media by optimizing your content and improving how you track these activities.
Optimize your content for dark social media
Not only is the amount of dark social media activity increasing, but so is trust in the content shared on dark social. Consumers tend to value personal recommendations and are therefore more likely to trust content shared through private channels from people they know.
Marketers in a Capterra study estimated that 47% of all conversations about brands and products take place on dark social media channels. These channels are the primary means of disseminating valuable brand information, so it's important to optimize content that drives sharing and conversation.
- Customize content that resonates with specific audiences. Avoid messages that are too general and broad. If you try to appeal to everyone, you won't connect with anyone. Create valuable content to drive conversations and increase the likelihood of peer-to-peer recommendations. Relevance helps keep content from getting lost in a culture of mindless scrolling.
- Please make good use of the links. Leverage UTM parameters and link shorteners on your social media content to make it easier to share and track your site's traffic from the source. Additionally, incorporate a “share” button on your webpage to quickly forward it to other channels.
- Adjust your brand's platform strategy Where the darkest social media activity takes place. According to research from Capterra, 68% of marketers agree that the most dark social conversations and shares occur on private social media pages or groups, followed by private messages within native apps like Facebook Messenger and Instagram. (62%). Despite the growing popularity of social media platforms like TikTok, these marketers believe that most underground social activity takes place on major apps like Facebook and Instagram.
Improve your tracking and prove the value of your campaigns
Metrics determine whether your marketing team can obtain resources and funding. But a major hurdle marketers face is overestimating the influence of one channel and underestimating the power of another.
Tracking social media activities behind the scenes is a prime example of how difficult it is to pinpoint accurate attribution. Given their private nature, most marketers say they don't have confidence in accurately measuring the conversations taking place on these channels.
Here's how to apply common tactics that other marketers are using to better track these “invisible” conversations.
- Build a strong foundation with a data strategy. The most common challenges to accurately measuring dark social media activity are customer data or technology limitations. Creating a long-term data strategy that outlines how data will be collected and used will not only help you improve your data capabilities, but also help with potential technology investments.
- Improve Google Analytics. Isolate your direct traffic to see where your audience is coming from. First, filter out traffic to your homepage and easy-to-remember landing pages. This can help you determine whether visitors to your brand page are likely to have come directly to your site, or if the traffic is coming from another source.
- Ask your audience. Sounds easy, right? An easy way to gather feedback is to ask, “How did you hear about us?” A form on your website asks customers how they discovered your business.
- Leverage referral programs through influencer marketing. As brands increasingly invest in influencer campaigns, one popular way to measure underground social activity is by working with influencers to use traceable codes and links within their content.
Solving measurement challenges requires effort, but the rewards are worth it. 55% of marketers say effectively tracking their social media activity helps them demonstrate the value of their campaigns, and 53% say it helps them achieve their long-term marketing goals. According to respondents, it has an impact on .
Marketers see potential, but not enough is being done
Despite its appeal, 60% of marketers believe that dark social media is not being used effectively in their industry, and a further 54% believe that their companies are not taking dark social media seriously enough. I am answering.
Marketers may be skeptical about prioritizing dark social activities, perhaps due to challenges in accurate measurement or their elusive nature. That's why it's important to get leaders on board early. We'll show you how dark social activity feeds into broader business goals and introduce tracking methods to help improve measurement.
The shadowy activities of social media may feel invisible, but their impact is anything but. In fact, 81% of marketers say they expect growth to continue over the next year. Marketers can make their work more defensible by better attributing these dark social activities.
