Sharing Through Dark Social Media

On the web you can share content via social media (Facebook, Twitter, et al.) or you can share through channels which aren’t public by design (e-mails, instant messaging). The latter are called dark social media. This sounds sinister, but basically entails private referral traffic that’s harder to track, as it comes back without referral data attached.

Retailers and publishers like sharing, because it promotes their goods, services and content for free. It’s all about customers recruiting future customers. And it’s nice to know how your content gets spread, through which channels, because you can then push the right buttons to promote your content even better.

Research by RadiumOne concludes dark social media sharing amounts to quite a chunk of total sharing. As the infographic by Statista based on RadiumOne’s findings shows, 84 percent of content is shared through e-mails and messaging tools, and most of the shares are on mobile devices. (Note that RadiumOne also provides purpose built software.)

This chart was published by FIPP.