Dive Brief:
- According to research by RadiumOne cited by Digiday, 82% of mobile sharing happens via email, messaging and texting, also known as “dark social,” a figure up from less than 50% just two years ago.
- Dark social, or dark traffic, was given the name because the sharing is inherently social although it’s not measurable in terms of social media marketing purposes.
- The research also found that only 13% of mobile sharing happens on Facebook.
Dive Insight:
The issue of dark social sharing is also affecting publishers’ ability to understand online traffic. Digiday reported that secure encryption technology on websites and services also impede publishers’ ability to track referral traffic.
Daniel Price, head of social operations at Lost Boys, told Digiday, “By building functionality and utility into Facebook Messenger, it becomes more of a web platform than a social messaging app,” explaining why marketers are beginning to build directly on platforms to have some control over tracking and measurement.
Social media measurement has long been an issue. Snapchat is the latest major social media platform to begin adding third-party measurement partners for viewability and targeting metrics. Even Facebook was pressured into adding third-party partners for measurement to provide independent metrics alongside its own very robust reporting on ad performance. Dark social is a challenge because it skirts all ability to follow mobile sharing.
RadiumOne’s research was based actions taken by its 940 million people on the platform across the globe.