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Social media is a smart way for entrepreneurs and small businesses to attach with customers by sharing useful content, company news, promotions and answering questions. Most importantly, customers can easily share this information with their network of friends and family.
For many small businesses, this helps generate a file a significant part (over 40%) their annual revenues. While most social media platforms come equipped with tools and buttons for easy sharing, more and more consumers are turning to a practice called dark communities.
Dark social refers to the sharing of online and social media content through private communication channels comparable to email, easy messaging or encrypted applications comparable to WhatsApp. While it’d seem to be all stakes are equal, dark communities are a real headache for entrepreneurs attempting to optimize their marketing efforts. Globally, roughly 70% of all shares on social media is done through dark social media channels by simply copying and pasting a link into a message. Although traffic from these sources is high, it becomes unattainable to trace it using traditional analytics tools.
Despite these challenges, dark sharing on social media can provide many advantages to your business. Because links are shared directly from a trusted source comparable to friends or family, your audience is more prone to trust the link and click. For this reason, every small business owner must learn to maximise the impact of reaching this hidden audience. Here’s how:
1. Create content specifically for dark communities
Since click-through rates are higher with dark sharing on social media, content ought to be tailored to encourage private sharing with friends and family. First, dark social content must be mobile-friendly, as most web usage today happens on mobile devices. The content that will probably be most successful will probably be content that evokes emotion or stimulates discussion.
For example, content that evokes nostalgia could also be popular with older audiences. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box to make your content visual and fun. Short videos (like TikTok videos) and infographics make great dark social content.
2. Use UTM parameters
Unfortunately, traffic coming from links shared on dark social media channels often registers as direct traffic, which suggests analytics tools are unable to tell apart the user who clicked the link or entered the URL into the browser. One solution is to incorporate UTM parameters, or Urchin trackers, in your links. In short, they are small pieces of code added to the end of a URL that provide additional information to web analytics tools. These UTM parameters may be used to discover the source as a specific campaign or a specific location on your site.
The only problem with UTM parameters is that the URL can develop into quite long. This increases the risk of the user not copying the full URL, resulting in a broken link. To solve this problem, you need to use tools like Bitly to shorten the URL and make it more user-friendly.
3. Provide more sharing options
In some cases, you may actively encourage dark sharing on social media by providing your audience with additional sharing options. For example, you may add a quick link at the end of your content to make it easier to email the link to a friend. Content with a clear call to motion (CTA) that encourages the viewer to share information or send it to a friend is more prone to be shared.
Offering exclusive or limited-time offers is one other technique to create an environment where people need to share your content. For example, some brands may offer a discount code that encourages people to pass on their savings and promote the brand to others. This is especially useful for proprietary content (comparable to e-books or webinars) because it provides an exclusive feel.
4. Use social listening tools
The thing about private communication is that it is private. Understanding what consumers think about your product and brand is difficult when their conversations happen behind closed doors. To get the most out of your dark social efforts, sometimes you want to get a feel for consumer sentiment.
While you may’t track dark social media directly, you may leverage tools like Brandwatch to observe trends, specific keywords, hashtags and brand mentions in real time. Not only can this provide worthwhile insight into the types of conversations taking place in private channels, but they will also be broken down into useful demographic and geographic data.
Dark communities will proceed to be a challenge for small businesses seeking to leverage social media and understand their customers. But this doesn’t have to be an obstacle. Because dark communities are more influential and meaningful than direct company messages through promoting, adopting this trend can significantly increase your company’s repute and sales.