dark social
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.89 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
4
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Interactions via the World Wide Web that cannot be publicly viewed, tracked or logged, such as private messages, texts and e-mails.
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "This means that this vast trove of social traffic is essentially invisible to most analytics programs. I call it DARK SOCIAL [author's capitalsation]. It shows up variously in programs as "direct" or "typed/bookmarked" traffic, which implies to many site owners that you actually have a bookmark or typed in www.theatlantic.com into your browser. But that's not actually what's happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone Gchatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you."
- "According to a RadiumOne study, almost 70% of all online referrals come from dark social globally. For the UK, this figure increases to 75%."
- "This shift in consumer behaviour underlines how much marketing now comes through social media, and specifically dark social."
- "Dark social has a profound impact on social and digital marketing strategies. It evades the reach of standard tracking tools and obscures a significant portion of consumer behavior and interaction, leading to incomplete or skewed data on customer engagement, the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and even conversion paths."
Etymology
From dark (“hidden, secret”) + social (“relating to social media or social networks”); compare Dark Web (“the portion of the Deep Web hosted on restricted networks”). Coined 12 October 2012 by Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic (see quotations), in reference to Internet traffic (clicks) from hyperlinks sent via private messages that are thus invisible to most analytics programs.