Is your Facebook profile an accurate reflection of you?
Let’s be honest - we all twist the truth sometimes. Compared to the articles we read and conversations with friends on WhatsApp, our social media profiles reveal little about who we really are.
Recent research has shown this is true. Based on over one billion data points from hundreds of publishers worldwide, the ‘private-social dissonance’ is a ratio calculated by comparing private engagement (CTR) and social engagement (share rate). By plotting a graph according to the topic, the data shows that in private we read about things like crime, fashion and celebrities. Meanwhile we share but rarely read articles about topics that make us seem ‘socially desirable’, like books, wine and the arts.
This is fine for our social standing, but problematic for marketers. While a professed passion for philosophy might make us look good, it means our social shares, public activity and proclaimed interests on social media are not to be trusted. So how can brands truly find out what makes their customers tick?
Our latest whitepaper, Forecasting the Future of Branded Content, predicts that, given how valuable it would be for marketers to understand consumers’ true interests, new analytics tools will likely be designed to leverage private chats and grant marketers unprecedented access to their desired audiences. Termed ‘dark social’, the content of our conversations may soon be anonymised and made available to marketers. Brands will no longer be left in the dark by what we pretend to like on social media.
Shedding light on dark social
‘Dark social’ first came to light when global research showed that 77% of content sharing and over 80% of sharing on mobile was taking place on messenger apps, email and text. Marketers began to realise that word-of-mouth was the reason for huge amounts of untagged traffic they had assumed was organic. Now, dark social has grown beyond the context of traffic to refer more broadly to our conversations - with or without link sharing - on non-public social channels.
Last year, messaging apps overtook social networks in number of users, and mobile is becoming the dominant device: the 2.125 billion monthly users of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and Viber are all on mobile. Despite this, over 90% of social and sharing marketing investment is still going to public channels, not private ones where consumers are increasingly spending their time.
Fast-forwarding to 2020, we can look at how the face of marketing could change if we embrace the world of dark social.
The possibilities are endless
Dark social will trigger the greatest opportunities for personalisation in marketing to date. With algorithms to process natural language around financial circumstances or personal relationships, marketers will be able to tailor content and delivery to specific personal events. Brands can be on-hand to share advice on topics they’re knowledgeable about to consumers in moments of need. If two friends who recently became parents are worriedly talking about future finances on Facebook Messenger, for example, Visa could offer them timely and useful advice on how to create a nest egg for their kids.
Developments in artificial intelligence will drive the potential of dark social even further. Feeding dark social data into deep learning engines will allow for the automation of real-time personalisation based on social conversations, private link sharing and private engagement. Facebook has already built DeepText, a neural network that analyses the written word. So if you can’t stop talking about the TV show Stranger Things to your friends on WhatsApp, a deep learning engine might process your conversations, calculate your interest and suggest you buy the box set of Twin Peaks. Rather than clumsily dropping you into wider categories, like all things 80s or murder mystery, deep learning will craft personal, accurate customer profiles with near-human accuracy.
So why aren’t we using it?
Imagine the number of times consumers have shared product links with contacts on dark social channels. Now consider that brand marketers have never been aware of any of these shares. It seems like a lot of lost opportunities, but there are good reasons why marketers have been missing out.
Dark social doesn’t yet feature on many marketing strategies because it’s a vast, hidden and unstructured mass of private data, unintelligible to today’s analytics tools and impossible to leverage at scale. Fortunately, it’s only a matter of time before the technology catches up. We anticipate that by 2020, analytics platforms will be able to analyse natural language, instead of just keywords, across all private communication channels. In addition, they will build a bigger picture with individual interest graphs, based on private engagement with articles and private link sharing.
The larger stumbling block is that dark social represents private conversations, meaning marketers must tread with caution. A set of industry guidelines is needed to address how to anonymise dark social data and respect consumer privacy. In addition, platforms must be upfront and honest with consumers whose data they collect; they will have to raise awareness and assuage concerns, much like websites now do with cookies.
Consumers are increasingly happy to exchange their data for free content, and this is setting the scene sooner than expected for the rise of dark social marketing. Once analytics tools have caught up with the rise of private communication channels, a large, untapped mine of information will open up. Let’s not forget, it’s where up to 84% of global content sharing takes place. All this will lead the marketing industry one step closer to personalising the web. If empathy is the currency of marketing, dark social data is rich with insights — all of it truthful, none of it posing.
To find out more about how your brand can drive revenue through making meaningful connections with relevant audiences, download our free white paper, Forecasting the Future of Branded Content.
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