Australians might be the highest per capita users of social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter, but they are also the biggest proponents of ‘dark social’ sharing globally, according to the RadiumOne study The Light and Dark of Social Sharing.
The study of 900 million connected devices found Australians are sharing most content about products and brands via email, text or instant message to selective, intimate groups of friends rather than on social media.
Australians share 75 per cent of content via dark social, compared to the global average of 69 per cent. They also generate three times more clicks on shared email and text message links than people do anywhere else in the world.
Social networks such as Facebook account for just 21 per cent of sharing activity in Australia. The preference for dark social over social media platforms could be due to sharers being conscious about what they post on public networks.
“There’s a big world of sharing going on out there which is not being dictated by social media. Across the 260,000 large global sites in our network, we see at least 60 per cent – sometimes 80 per cent – of all sharing happening with old-school copy and paste links or articles, which are sent via email to the people who really matter in someone’s network,” RadiumOne Asia-Pacific managing director Kerry McCabe told BRW.
The growing popularity of the dark social trend comes at a time when Facebook is facing criticism for becoming more like a paid advertising media channel. Blue chip brands are frustrated by Facebook’s crackdown on conversations between companies and consumers via the platform.
“Facebook wants to drive everyone into the paid funnel which goes against what everyone believed Facebook was set up to be in the first place,” says Universal Music’s marketing director Nathan Thompson.
“Dark social is incredibly powerful. It’s called dark for a reason because it’s going outside your mainstream social sharing networks. You really need to be there because Facebook is getting harder and harder.”
