← The Mindful Marketing Podcast (Formerly Known As The Savvy Social Podcast)
The Mindful Marketing Podcast (Formerly Known As The Savvy Social Podcast)
Dark Social: What is it + How it’s Affecting Your Business
00:24:29
Let’s talk about the mysterious world of dark social—and no, it’s not some secret, underground social network (though that sounds way cooler than it actually is). It’s the stuff happening in the background, like when someone texts your TikTok...
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Drea
What even is dark social media and how will it affect you as a business owner and as a marketer? I'm gonna hopefully answer those questions and at least give you some more to think about. In this episode of the Mindful Marketing podcast, I have to give a shout out to our sponsor, Riverside. Riverside is the virtual recording studio that I use to record this here, right here podcast. With over 320 episodes under my belt, I know a thing or two about podcast recording and Riverside makes it so freaking easy. I literally just go into my studio, hit record, and after I'm done, I click Magic Edit and voila, it edits the podcast for me. What I also love is their magic clips. If you see those vertical videos like Reels or TikToks that I'm posting on social, that comes from Riverside's AI capabilities, which is just absolutely fantastic. If you love a good shortcut like me, you gotta check out Riverside, click the link in my show notes and use the code drea at check out for your little discount. All right, let's get into Dark social. So first let's define it. I have resources for this episode. As always, I'll put the links in the show notes. But the term dark social was first spotted on the interwebs and coined by Alexis c. Midrigal in 2012, wrote an article for the Atlantic all about dark social. And dark social basically is social sharing, say content that you share from social media, but it's outside of measurable analytics. So I'm talking about when someone texts you a TikTok video, when you DM a friend with like a link to an account that you just found. These are not public facing ways that we can see if people are engaging with our content. Sometimes too, when you go in to tools like Google Analytics and you see direct traffic coming in, that direct traffic could potentially be something that someone shared from dark social. So for example, I love watching TikTok videos. Now that I have two Littles, I basically text my husband cute ideas and I'm like, oh, we could do this with the girls. And so I'm on Disney TikTok, which is fun and also overwhelming at the same time. But we have Disney on our vision board. And so I saw this video of these two little girls doing like the princess experience. And I texted that video to my husband. Now it ended there for us. But for someone watching that video, if they wanted the Disney experience, there is no clickable link in that TikTok video. In fact, the video was by an influencer, so or a content creator. Wasn't even co signed or collaborated with by Disney themselves. And so I would then go to Disney's website or even go to Google and search the Disney Princess experience. But tracking is totally lost in that scenario. And so this is where the term dark social comes from. It's different from your traditional social media engagement. Right. So dark social is on the rise right now. Studies are showing that particularly with Gen Z, or as my toddler has been correcting me now, Gen Zed, because you know, we're Canadian and it's a Zed in the rest of the world, apparently. Gen Z, Gen Z, they are into dark social. And if we think about platforms like the rise of Snapchat for instance, Snapchat is a platform that is all about private messaging. And in fact it's where Instagram stories came from. Instagram stories became a thing because Instagram was trying to steal the idea from Snapchat. And with Snapchat you're sharing content, sure, but it's not link focused and it's not really discoverable. The whole point of it is you're having conversations with your inner circle, with your friends. And I have friends who use social media instead of texting, which is wild to me, maybe because I work in social, but I would never message someone on Instagram and in replace of a text. I guess I'm the weird gal out in this scenario because a lot of people do that instead of texting. They'll use Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messenger. But even if we think about other messaging apps, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, all of these are examples of dark social. If we even broaden the term further, we see private communities, Facebook groups, even my circle community could be considered dark social. Any sort of exchange happening, whether it's a SMS or email, where you're sharing links, that also is considered dark social. And then anything else, like you're on a zoom call with someone and they're like, oh, you've never heard of this? Here's the link that could also be considered dark social. So all of these variety of communication styles have an impact when we think about tracking. And that's why they're under the umbrella of the term dark social. Right? Dark social. Now this is on the rise, like I said, because of Gen Z. But this is actually really important for business owners to understand the impact of because when we start looking at our content, we start looking at, you know, engagement on Instagram is down, we start looking at, you know, video views on TikTok have gone down over the past year or so. And we start seeing, you know, all of these metrics kind of taking a downturn. It may feel discouraging. It may feel like, what? What am I even doing this for? However, if we think about the lack of tracking that happens on Dark Social, if Dark Social is on the ris, then a correlation that we could perhaps make is that engagement may be down, yes, but perhaps people are doing other actions instead of liking and commenting. This has been confirmed by Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram. In a recent video, Adam Aseri said that there are more people engaging with DMs direct messages in the app than they are with feed posts. So because of that, Instagram is actively seeking to amplify content that prompts more sharing behavior, I. E. Posts that inspire more users to tap the send, you know, little paper airplane icon and forward it to their friends. Okay. And to, to further this, he said, you know, don't force it. But when you're making content, think about making content that people want to send to a friend, to someone they care about, and it will help your reach over time. So Instagram, mega platform, mega, you know, meta sub brand of a, of a platform, which also I'm assuming is part of what Facebook and Threads is deeming important as well. Instagram has deemed that sharing content, sending it, not necessarily sharing it to your stories or sharing it publicly, but sharing it privately is one of the best ways to increase your reach and engagement over time. Straight from the horse's mouth, friends. So is social sharing important? Absolutely. How does this, this infect your engagement as a business owner? Well, you're measuring success differently. You're measuring success differently. So I talk about this with my members a lot. When we look at our analytics for posts, sometimes we look at a post, let's say we are, you know, sharing a Black Friday sale, okay? We post about it and then we don't see as much likes, we don't see as many comments as we'd like, and we get discouraged. But ultimately, when we're talking about Black Friday sale, we don't want someone to like and comment. We want them to go to our website and buy the dang thing, right? And so when I think about the success of social media, it is not in likes and comments. It is in people taking action in other ways. And in dark social, that means sharing. Now, for some brands, sharing privately is actually the thing that we want people to do. It's the thing we want to encourage. So for example, I used to work with a client of mine who was a, almost like A sexual education brand, particularly for black and indigenous people of color. And when we think about the type of content that they were posting, it's not often that someone would like and comment on that content. In fact, those aren't metrics that we would look at for that brand really at all. Because while engagement, liking and commenting is great, sharing and saving is more likely an action that that AUD would take just due to the subject matter and the nature of the brand. Right. And so when we think about this rise of dark social and people shifting their social activity and their behavior away from liking and commenting and towards sharing and saving, we start to acknowledge that sharing and saving are more important and we don't need the validation from likes and comments when it comes to social media analytics. I also want to acknowledge that some of these shifts don't just affect Gen Z, I think they're, they're affecting everyone. And this is just my hypothesis, but when we think about all of the data privacy breaches and issues that we've had in the recent history, I think a lot of people are shying away from putting everything online. My generation, so I'm 35 now, so my generation, we got the Internet and we're one of the first generations to be using the Internet quite young. I remember being on forums and things when I was 14, you know, and we had the family computer in the basement, right? And so I remember having access to the Internet and having access to sharing. And in fact, I remember there was a daily journaling tool that was photo based. I don't remember the name of it, like Be Real or Be Live or something like that where me and my Tumblr friends would share our lives on this live journaling tool. And thinking back, it's actually just wild how much information I would put on the Internet. I would never do that today, but we kind of went all out because we didn't fully understand the consequences of doing that. Plus I was like young at the time, right? And so now with all of these privacy breaches and how our data is being scraped and even things like the rise of AI and people creating deep fakes of people, you can, you know, use AI to video for voice. People could literally steal your likeness and do whatever they want with it online. So there's a, there's a lack of trust happening with public facing social media right now as well. That has to impact, in my opinion, the rise of dark social. The other thing is, I think we are collectively experiencing a bit of fatigue from social media. So with the pandemic which was over four years ago now, almost five years. It doesn't feel like it's been that long. But with the pandemic we all turned to virtual connection because frankly that is all we had. Right. But I think it, we got overstimulated by it and now there's a bit of a fatigue for social media and I'm seeing it a lot with my business owner friends where we put so much of ourselves and our business into social media. We're doing, we're checking all the boxes, we're doing everything we're supposed to be doing and yet we feel exhausted by it all. And some days we just want to log out of everything and disappear, never log in again. And I think that's because we give too much to social media and there's, there's that fatigue from it. Right. And we're craving more real connection, more in person connection from it. And so those how these hypothesis hypotheses together create the perfect storm for dark social to be on the rise. So what are we to do? What are we to do as business owners and as marketers? Well, I think that there's a way that we can lean into the craving for dark social without doing the most and doing all of the things right. And so I want to give an example of a brand that did this. I actually, so I follow this substack of Rachel Carton, it's called Link in bio and it's, it's one of the few sub stacks that I actually pay for because her BTS roundup, I don't know, are these emails, are they blogs? I don't know, posts. They're amazing. Like she is just like on the ground floor of a lot of things happening in social media. A lot of the things that she covers are focused on bigger brands but I extrapolate from that because you know, bigger brands have larger teams and she's interviewing their teams, she's dissecting the top performing content pieces. It's just a really fantastic resource. But I particularly love it because, well, I like nerding out about social media and because I get to see the behind the scenes. So one of the interviews she did was with the social media manager or director for a brand called Topicals, which is a skincare brand and they actually created a private community for their customers and they did it through a custom platform. The screenshots make it look like social media, like it kind of looks like it could be a Twitter esque style platform anyways. They created this private space for their customers and they have over 9,000 customers in this space who are happily sharing their experience. Okay. And so what I think is so neat about this is that as a brand, they're leaning into, quote unquote, dark social. They're creating these separate, like, anti social media spaces, even though they look a lot like social, private community, smaller communities. And they're building trust with their customers and clients all at the same time. Okay. And so I read this article and I instantly thought of more brands that I participate in that do this. So, for example, I wear wigs. I have alopecia. I've had it since I was 12. So I'm used to this life at this point. And so I buy a lot of hair replacement products if I can put it in that category. And one that I purchased from, they like, I purchased it. And immediately I got an invitation via email to join their Facebook group. And of course, as a marketer, I'm like, okay, let me see what this is all about. What I loved about it is it seemed to build camaraderie with customers. Like they're all taking pictures of their wig, different styles of their wig, posting in the group, asking people for feedback, like, hey, I have this one. Should I buy that one? And even though I'm just like a lurker, I don't post, I don't comment, I do anything. For me, it made me feel safer purchasing because it's a lot of money to purchase these units. It made me feel safer because I felt like I was in a community of like minded people. Okay. And this goes for many different communities. I read a lot of romance novels, and so authors often do this where they'll create communities for their most avid readers. And I'm in a few of those. And I just love it because I get to fangirl and freak out over my favorite characters in the space with other people who are doing the same thing. And so I think this is such a powerful strategy to consider as a brand and a business owner because it's very different from the free Facebook group model of the old and you. So when I first started professionally in social media in 2014, is a very common strategy to create a free Facebook group, funnel those people into your paid product. The challenge with that is you're getting a bunch of people who aren't really committed to the. To the group. They're just kind of there, and it's not really clear sometimes who the owner or founder of the group is. And it just is a very convoluted process to try in 2024. I wouldn't ever suggest a free Facebook group strategy like starting from scratch in 2024. It's not really something that I would do. So I think there are some ways as businesses and brands that we can lean into the concept of private or smaller communities of people, especially people who I would consider super fans and really encourage the sharing of our products. Right. We want to encourage people to get excited along with us. I do see my membership as a version of this. It is the main way that people can work with me now and it is the most fun for me to be able to work with people in this way. And it's just a private space, especially for my pro members. When I think about the challenges, the comments and questions that they may have, it's not something you'd want to post on social media. Right? You want to have a space where you're like, hey, so I have this client problem, I need some help or I'm thinking about hiring and I need to like draft up a, you know, job description or I need to like budget for 2025. Like all of these things aren't things you'd post on social media, but in a safe space in. In a space where you can feel like trusted, it absolutely could help. Okay, so when we think about marketing and business and dark social, how do we take that next step? Well, one of the things I do want you to consider is what does dark social look like for your community? Okay, what does dark social look like for your community? Is it as simple as Instagram broadcast channel? Or are you creating client customer only communities? Are you building spaces where your people can gather, maybe even in person? Are you encouraging people to message you or to share content? Are you creating content with the purpose of sharing? I think sometimes as business owners too, we don't create content that isn't designed to be shareable. We kind of create content and hope people will like and comment on it or go to our website and buy. But are we truly creating content where someone goes, oh this is so good, I have to share it with my bestie or this is great, I have to send it to the group chat. Right? So how can we adapt our strategy to build client customer only spaces? How do we adapt our content to focus more on sharing versus then public engagement? And then how do we think about the future of dark social and the evolution of social media? Are we too reliant on public facing social media posts? Are we too reliant on the algorithm? These are all questions that do not yet have answers. But I want to prompt you with them to hopefully get you to start thinking about how dark social can impact you and your business. Lastly, I want you to think about this. People are talking about you and your brand, no matter what. Okay? So I once saw this conversation online. I'm trying not to give too much away because it was in a private community where an individual was very upset about a Reddit thread about them. And I didn't say anything. The time, not my space, not my, not my, not my community, not for me. Okay? But my thought was people are going to talk about you anyways. And the fact that they did it on Reddit just means that more people were jumping into the, into the fray, into the conversation. I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing. I think it can be challenging, for sure, especially if it's factually inaccurate or intentionally, you know, belligerent. That can be very challenging, of course, but. And as business owners and content creators, marketers, we can't really do anything about that, right? Like, we can't, we can't monitor how people use Reddit. What we can do is focus in on our clients and customers who do like us and create amazing product experiences. We can create amazing marketing experiences. One of my goals personally is when people interact with me in my brand that they smile. I don't want them to feel overwhelmed. I don't want them to feel judging about themselves or cringy. I want them to go, huh, that was nice. And then I want them to feel inspired to go do something about it. And so can I control if someone goes to Reddit and they go, I purchased this product and it was terrible. No, I can't control that. However, my hope is that I've built so much karma and goodwill and put that into the world that if someone were to go on Reddit and say, I hate this product so much that my amazing community would then jump in and go, well, I liked it and I had such amazing experience and here's why. And so that's my hope. It's. I can't control what other people do, what they share, how they react, but I can control my own efforts that I put into it. So the future I am working on my predictions episode for 2025, and one of my predictions is that dark social is going to become even more important. And not just dark social, but the community and connection piece of social media. We kind of swung away from that a little bit. We swung towards broadcasting and blasting out and shouting into the void. And we're Swinging back. The pendulum is swinging back to connection and community in such a different way. You know, like when I started on the Internet in 2004, I'm an Internet granny, y'all. I've been in here 20 years. When I started back on the Internet in 2004, that was the point. Connection and community. And really we were connecting with people we already knew. Or we're in forums where we had similar ideas and similar likes. Okay, now with the focus on content discovery, I think it's gonna be very interesting to see how this shifts the overall importance or lack thereof on creating content. I think it'll shift the amount of content that's being created. I think there's gonna be a focus on high quality content. But I will be sharing all of those stats in an upcoming episode. For now, just know that my advice is to embrace the trend. Think about how you can layer dark social intentionally into your strategy. So focus on sharing content. Consider building client customer only groups. Encourage direct messages and emails, and be nimble. That's been my word so far. Nimble and flexible about the future and how that may change how you approach your marketing. That's it for this here episode of the Mindful Marketing Podcast. Make sure you rate and review on Apple podcasts and Spotify helps keep us in the top 100 marketing podcasts. I also have to say, oh, next week I'm talking with Kate Doster. It was an amazing interview all about bundles and it just like stay tuned for that. And then lastly, I've rebranded the savvy social school is now the Mindful Marketing Lab. So if you've been creeping my website, you saw the change already. You're on my email list. You saw me hint about it. It is now official. I'm really, really excited about this shift for me and for my members and this episode is an example of why I'm making that shift. Because less of a focus on social media content production and more of a focus on like building virtual digital communities online. And that can happen anywhere. Not just on social. As this episode proves. It's not just on social is everywhere. So if that excites you, head onto my website onlinedrea. And check out the Mindful Marketing Lab. I'll be back at you next week with another episode. Bye for now.