The Washington Post has confirmed that Russian operatives used Facebook Custom Audiences to hyper-efficiently target Ads on Facebook. CNN further confirms that these groups specifically targeted swing states including Wisconsin and Michigan, which President Trump won by less than 1%. Continue reading “Why Russia’s Facebook Election Ads Were So Effective”
Category: Dark Social Media
Give Dark Social Some Light
Have you ever found the perfect BuzzFeed quiz, Which Bachelor Contestant Would You Most Likely End Up With? but decided that not all your Facebook friends needed to know your results, so you messaged the quiz to your co-worker through G-chat?
If that is something you have done, then you have participated in dark social. Dark social is a private conversation, a lot of times happening through email, text and social apps and involves sharing a link to a piece of content from a social channel through one of these platforms. What makes it dark is that the referral can’t be tracked. It looks like people are heading straight to your website and reading content there but that may not be the case, they are getting there in a way most analytics platforms can’t track. Continue reading “Give Dark Social Some Light”
Shining The Light On Dark Social
For many marketers, the shares their piece of content receives on social is the lifeline to their marketing efforts, development, and budgets but it turns out you can’t actually see much of what is being shared.

A report released by RadiumOne shows that nearly 82% of sharing is done through dark social.
Through dark social? I didn’t know there was a dark side…
Dark social is dominating how people share, is an increasingly vital source to explain referral traffic and is significant in understanding how what people share publicly differs from what they are sharing privately. When marketers understand dark social it can help brands know their customers, personalize their marketing messages and ensure customers are receiving relevant content- dark social has proven too valuable to ignore anymore. Continue reading “Shining The Light On Dark Social”