Marketing initiatives in 2018 have increasingly become data-driven. Digital marketers have realized this and are tracking hundreds if not thousands of digital marketing metrics for all their client engagements and achieving significant results. This includes dark social data.
Marketing analytics measure the success of a marketing effort by collecting data related to marketing actions of the buyers. The data collected includes everything from website traffic to Facebook likes which helps provide insight into what can be improved and the ROI.
For marketing analytics to be useful data traffic must be tracked, watched and analysed. However, with the influx of private chat applications so has the popularity of the dark social media. The Dark social as ominous as the name may sound, is actually all the online activity that occurs outside of the public social media sphere.
Such traffic usually labeled as ‘direct’ traffic can’t be accurately tracked or picked up by web analytics platforms. They include Email, text messages and Messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram.
Marketers need to understand that the dark social channels are dominating online content sharing in 2018. A myriad of digital content is shared daily in messaging apps like WhatsApp. Marketers and marketing agencies need to seize the opportunity to harness the dark social traffic to improve their strategies as well as their ROI.
To better track dark social data and analyze their outcome, here are some of the three of the most popular tools you can utilize.
Po.st from Radium One
Po.st from Radium one
Po.st enables your content to be easily shared across various platforms thereby increasing your general organic traffic. They provide new users; comprehensive analytics, audience insights and improved paid media performance that help marketers optimize their content and drive user acquisition.
You will be happy to know all this is offered at no cost and no contract.
ShareThis
ShareThis is one of the most established and prominent social sharing plugins available. With very attractive sharing buttons, ShareThis integrates social analytics for better insights into audience tendencies and habits.
It supports over 120 social media networks allowing site visitors more ways to share your content on their favorite platforms. Their versions are available for specific WordPress and Custom PHP sites. They are also free for anyone willing to use them.
Get social app store
Unlike the others, Getsocial is a social media app store for marketers dark social analytics needs. One can create an account through their website or download their WordPress plugin or Spotify app.
Setting up the account is quite easy, once you have created the account; you have to paste a snippet of code into your HTML section. It is usually highlighted in a red color on top of the page. Once you have successfully inserted the code you can then the Address Bar Tracking app and click Activate. With that you can now track dark social data.
People will always share things in private. Especially now many people are employing the cut-paste tactics .Also as more and more governments continue to impose strict rules and regulations against social media usage, people will continue to share most of their data on dark social. So why not know about it and adjust accordingly?
Thanks for sharing