What is The Difference Between Dark Social & Dark Posts?

What Is the Difference Between Dark Social and Dark Posts?

So…what is the difference between dark social and a dark post?

In my work as a product specialist, I get this question all the time. The confusion is understandable due to the similar nomenclature, but never fear–I’m here to help!

It’s really an apples-to-oranges comparison. While dark posts (also known as unpublished posts) are ad objects, undoubtedly inside the traditional umbrella of social media, Dark Social has nothing to do with ads and doesn’t necessarily have to do with “traditional” social media at all.

Dark/Unpublished Posts

Let’s start with dark/unpublished posts. These posts are ad objects that appear in consumer timelines, but do not exist on the company’s social page. They appear as normal-looking posts, but have calls to action like “Learn More,” “Shop Now,” or “Like Page.” If you are reading this article, you have either purchased or seen these ads a million times.

But What About Dark Social?

Dark Social is an entirely different beast: it has nothing to do with ads. It refers simply to the private sharing of links via mediums that don’t pass a referrer in traditional web analytics platforms, such as email, Slack, Text, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat.

Slack

Facebook Messenger

Text

When we break down the term Dark Social, “Dark” relates to the fact that these conversions are often falsely attributed to direct traffic in your web analytics tool. The “social” component comes from the fact that this is a social interaction of two or more people. If it makes it easier, just think “private sharing.” 

Dark Social data is absolutely critical, not just for social teams, but for your marketing organization as a whole. In fact, you should be viewing Dark Social as its own marketing channel, one that contains a goldmine of data. Right now, around 80% of all sharing is dark. 80%!!! These private shares represent consumers who are typically at the bottom of the marketing funnel and/or huge fans and advocates of your brand. These are people sharing links to your products so that their friends, families, and co-workers will buy them, read your articles, and share your quizzes to help determine “Which Wildlife Excursion Should You Try In Manitoba?” (looking at you, Buzzfeed).

These interactions are occurring all the time, and you are missing the chance to optimize your content for goal completions that matter to your business. You are missing a nuanced perspective on the social activity sitting in your direct traffic bucket. Using this data, you can learn which products, content, or other web pages resonate most with your audience, so you can transform your social, email, and ad campaigns around the topics people likely to buy and engage deeply with your brand care most about.

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Breaking down the Facebook auction: How to manage rising CPMs and deliver sales

Facebook advertising has come a long way in the past few years, and it provides a highly profitable way for brands either to engage an existing audience or grow new ones.

Paid social media shares some common foundations with paid search, but there are some significant differences both in how its auction-based model works and in the interaction users have with its advertisements.

As such, this maturing-but-still-nascent form of advertising provides a huge amount of room for testing and innovation. It comes with its pitfalls too, as we have seen with the measurement scandals.

However, there are other challenges that affect paid social practitioners daily and they require novel solutions. Below, we have looked at what makes a successful campaign – and what to do when everything best practice tells us just doesn’t work.

The ABC of Facebook Advertising

A successful campaign can be broken down into 3 areas:

• Audiences: Deciding who you want to communicate with and how you want to utilize your audience lists and website visitor information.
• Bidding: Selecting to use manual or automated bids and choosing the metrics for your campaign, which will affect your campaign cost.
• Creative: Testing the right format for your audience since it will directly impact the effectiveness of the two categories above.

Let’s begin with the theory behind a best practice Facebook campaign across these three areas, with reference primarily to the auction that decides so much of how well our ads perform and how much they cost.

By way of contrast with AdWords, Facebook is inherently driven by images and their power to create an aspirational projection in the mind of the consumer.

AdWords works on a very pure, direct response model that is often based on text-based communication. A user types in a keyword and is met with a text-heavy response, although this stance is softening over time as results pages become more visually arresting.

Facebook allows a different approach to targeting, based on specific consumers rather than keywords. However, both are underpinned by an auction-based bidding system.

Facebook uses an auction for two main reasons: to create maximum value for advertisers and to improve the user’s experience. In an ideal world, this would see advertisers attract sales cost-effectively by providing a timely, relevant and enticing ad to the right consumers.

It is in understanding which aspects of this auction we can directly impact that we can start to affect our campaign costs.

Bids are defined by the bid value an advertiser sets (more on this below), multiplied by the percentage chance of their defined action being taken.

So if we want to bid on clicks as a metric, that value will be multiplied by Facebook’s estimated probability that that click will occur. Furthermore, bids in the same auction can target different outcomes: clicks vs. conversions, for example.

This is then combined with relevance and quality factors to come up with the final bid price and the auction winner. These last factors will be affected by things like image quality, negative comments on posts, and click-through rate. Note that this can change over time, affecting your costs on an ongoing basis as Facebook hoovers up more data on your performance.

An easier way to summarize and memorize this is B.E.A.R.:

These bids can be set as either manual or automatic. You are told to use automatic if you don’t know what you are willing to pay for that action. If you do have a price in mind, you are told to bid your “true value” of what your action is worth to you. For instance, if you can only afford to pay $30 to acquire a new user, Facebook suggests you set your manual bid at $30.

If setting it on manual, you can choose a maximum or an average bid. For maximum, the algorithm is stricter on the threshold and is supposed to only find conversions below your bid, but unfortunately this is not always the case.

For average bidding, it will find conversions above and below your bid to find one that will eventually even it out. As seen below, if your bid is $10, Facebook will find bids anywhere between $2 to $12 as long as it averages out to $10.

Regardless if bidding on maximum or on average, you should ensure to always have a budget that is five times your bid to give Facebook enough breathing room to learn.

But this theory doesn’t always hold true and best practice sometimes lets us down.

So, what are some of the most commonly-faced challenges, and how can we deal with them most effectively?

Audiences

Hyper-targeting hampers performance

It seems counter-intuitive at first, but getting a bit too carried away with Facebook’s impressive targeting options can actually slow your progress.

It is best to provide Facebook with as much data as possible for each ad set so that its algorithms can find the optimal match between creative and audience. As such, it is advisable to avoid audience segmentation at this stage unless it has a clear and defined benefit to your campaign goals.

Ads stop showing

This issue can be caused by many different factors. The first port of call (after checking your bids and budget, of course), should be your website. Check the implementation of the pixel (the Chrome extension is very useful here) and look into Analytics to check conversion rates on key landing pages.

If all seems fine on the site, check the interactions your audience has been having with your ad sets in the past. If these are overwhelmingly negative, this could be enough to convince Facebook to stop showing the ads altogether.

Audiences stop performing 

If there is excessive overlap between the audiences you are trying to target across different ad sets, Facebook will prevent the list with the lowest performance history from entering the auction. Excessive overlap can cause significant issues, but it can be avoided by using Facebook’s audience overlap tool.

The audience overlap tool will show the percentage overlap between lists (we recommend keeping it below 30%) and provide insight into where you should consider consolidating your lists.

Bidding

Rising CPMs

The auction is increasingly competitive and CPMs are rising as a result. Therefore, sometimes that “true value” that Facebook advises us to bid just isn’t high enough to compete.

However, there are many ways to arrive at the same CPM, so it is worth trialling new campaign objectives such as link clicks. This can be risky, but if you are confident that your landing page will convert well, it can allow you to hit the same revenue targets (or better) for a lower campaign cost.

Pixel problems

Another challenging area we encounter is with Facebook’s pixel. This needs to be implemented correctly at each stage of the conversion journey to give you the accurate data you need. It is also crucial to ensure that each of these events is tagged accurately.

This is a fundamental foundation if you plan to use sequential messaging to target your audience at different stages of their purchase journey.

Analyzing GA data

A challenging question – and one with no obvious, catch-all solution – is the attribution of Facebook conversions within a wider marketing strategy, particularly at impression level. The main symptom of this issue is conversion data on two everyday platforms (Facebook and Google Analytics) that simply don’t match up.

We could say that Facebook is rather generous in how it weights its own importance, with a 1-day view through and 28-day click through window as standard. Multiple clicks from the same user within a short timeframe will also be classified as separate sessions, unlike in Google Analytics.

Analytics and DoubleClick do not have access to Facebook impression data, meaning that it is difficult to square this circle comprehensively. We also need to accept that we simply aren’t comparing apples with apples; these two platforms facilitate a different form of advertising and, as such, their metrics will inevitably differ.

That said, a great way to mitigate this issue is to trial conversion lift testing. This works best retrospectively and requires some initial investment, but it does provide insight into the ‘true’ impact of a Facebook campaign.

This same logic applies to Facebook ad sets, if you want to understand the impact each is having on your overall performance.

There is some optimism to be found in Google’s data-driven attribution too which, although missing impression-level Facebook data, will still provide a clear view on clicks. Here, we would typically expect Facebook to appear higher in the funnel, demonstrating its importance as an assist channel.

Creative

Ads are not relevant enough

If we return to our friendly B.E.A.R acronym, it is clear that even the best bidding strategy will flounder if the ads are irrelevant to the selected audience.

This falls down further if the ads contain too much text or if they have received negative feedback and a low CTR in the past. It is therefore worth investing time into the research stage of your strategy, to ensure adequate planning of creative assets and target audiences.

Creative fatigue

Creative fatigue is a widespread challenge and a natural by-product of the experience of using social media platforms. Users are bombarded by images, videos and sounds, and they have attention spans reflective of this. Even the best-performing creative has a shelf-life and can end up having a negative impact if left active for too long.

They key here is to read the signs carefully in your performance data and know when to switch up either the creative or the audience. As a rule of thumb, we would recommend updating creative every 2-4 weeks.

Lack of creative resources

The important thing to remember is that you don’t need an extensive creative team to produce great creative assets. There are some fantastic, free apps available to use that can help you turn simple images into the thumb-stopping media Facebook craves.

Below we have listed our three everyday favorites:

Boomerang: This is a free app that will allow you to loop actions back in forth within an image. It’s great if you want to emphasize a specific element like a product, for example.

Cinemagraph Pro: In a cinemagraph, one part of a photo moves while the rest remains still. This app is free to use and will allow you to create cinemagraphs from any image.

Layout: A simple one, but an effective app nonetheless. Layout lets you create collages and show multiple products within one image space.

There is still a learning curve when it comes to Facebook advertising for the majority of marketers, which makes it an exciting but challenging place to be.

The landscape is constantly shifting, but the above will hopefully provide some guidance on how to navigate the main obstacles we have encountered thus far in 2017.

‘Breaking down the Facebook auction: How to combat inflated CPMs and bigger budgets to deliver more sales in 2017’ was originally presented by Clark Boyd and Ximena Sanchez of Croud at Social Media Week NYC 2017. You can view the full presentation here.

This article was co-authored by Ximena Sanchez and Clark Boyd of Croud.

Clark Boyd is VP Strategy at Croud, a global digital performance agency.

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Maintaining Your Social Media Profiles

After you have you social media profiles up and running, you may forget to pay attention to your profiles. It is easy to do as you are focused on posting, tweeting, and uploading videos. However, in order to maintain a positive image on social media networks a bit of maintenance is required. You need to make sure that you keep your social media profiles up to date at all times.

The social media profile is extremely important, so here are some things that you can do to make sure that you are getting the most out of your profile.

Adhere to Image Size Requirements

If your customer comes to your Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, or other social media page and sees a profile picture that is too large, too small, or out of focus, they are going to get a quick first impression that is not good. Most people will immediately think that if they cannot get their profile picture right, what else are they going to mess up? Make sure that you check the size requirements for each page and keep your photos at that size so they look their best and you make a good first impression.

Social Share Buttons

There is no real way to know the preference of our consumers for sharing content. For this reason, you want to make it as easy as possible for your consumers to share your content on whatever platform that they prefer. Use the buttons for the different social media sites so that if your customer likes Facebook they can share it there, if they want to pin an image to Pinterest, they can do so easily. Remember, you want them to share your information and in order for them to do this, you will need to make it as easy on them as possible.

Descriptions for Upcoming Events

When a person hears about your event on a social network it is important for them to know how to buy tickets or register. When you are creating descriptions for your event make sure that it is clear where the official registration for the event will occur.

Many users may click on the I’m going tab and not have any idea that they actually need to register for the event. Include easy to follow links when you are promoting your company events online.

Keywords

Despite what you may have heard, SEO is not dead and keywords are not a thing of the past. Social profiles are included in search engine results, which mean that your profile should include keyword rich text. The more that a keyword is used in your profile; the more likely you are going to be associated with that keyword on the social media platform. Make sure to use a keyword tool such as Google’s in order to make sure that your business is associated with the appropriate industry keywords.

Encourage Reviews

Remember, social media is all about engaging your consumers. You will want to make sure that you are encouraging your customers to leave reviews about their experiences with your business. They may leave reviews directly on your Facebook page or on other review sites such as Yelp or Urbanspoon.

Use Hashtags

Hashtags, phrases or words that are prefixed with the # symbol provide a way to group messages on social media sites. This is a great way to make your content or event stand out. Your hashtag can be anything from the name of your event to a special promotion to something simple. Make sure that your hashtag is descriptive so that it will keep your followers interested.

Be Real

As your social network communities begin to grow it is easy for your customers to begin to feel as though they have been lost in the crowd. One way to avoid having your consumer’s feel this way is to use their names when you are responding to their comments or questions.

Meta Descriptions and Title Tags

The title tag and Meta description of your blog or business needs to include your business name. If you do not include your name, a person that is searching for you may have difficulty finding you. For example, Whole Foods has a blog called Whole Story. This is a catchy title for their blog, but a person that is searching for it may have difficulty finding it as they do not know to search for that name.

To avoid these problems make sure that your company name is a part of the meta description and title tag for your blog so people that are searching for your business can find it easily.

Optimize Your Presence on Social Media

Just as you optimize your website for your business, you also need to optimize each of your social media sites. Businesses may add new social profiles at different times, which make it easy to create different profiles that are not cohesive.

It is important to make sure that your social media presence is optimized. If you are just starting out, focus on one social media outlet at a time. Facebook is typically one of the easier social media sites to set up. When you are ready to move on to one of the others, make sure that the information that you are providing is similar in style and format on all of the other platforms that you create.

Your bio’s and profiles should be kept up to date at all times. Make sure that you complete each of the profiles and clean them up as necessary. A clear and concise description of your business, your logo, and the URL of your website should always be included.

Put a regular housekeeping check on your calendar. Once a month or so make sure that you check all of your social media profiles to keep the logos, images, and information up to date.

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How To Build A Highly Effective Personal Brand Using Social Media.

If you’re like most high-performing professionals (especially at the senior management level), you’re probably used to having job opportunities fall into your lap.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me that you didn’t need a resume to land your last job, or that you haven’t used a resume for your last several roles.

It’s been like this for decades: someone in your existing network recommends you; a consulting agreement turns into something more significant; a new job is finalised over a coffee meeting.

There’s nothing wrong with this approach. It’s worked for years, and will continue to work – albeit to a lesser extent – for years to come.

But there is a catch: we’re currently undergoing a massive disruption to the way job search happens.

How Social Media Will Change Your Career.

Social media is democratising the process, which means that recruiters and decision makers have access to a much broader pool of job seekers.

That old school word-of-mouth networking many professionals rely on? Now it has to compete with digital networking, personal branding or, as I like to call it, “human marketing”.

In this new world order, digitally savvy candidates with fewer in-real-life relationships, but a better understanding of how to leverage social media effectively, are capturing an increasingly large share of the opportunity pie.

If you’re not ready to become a digital dinosaur just yet, here’s my five-point plan to leveraging social media to manage your career and land the right opportunities – in 2016, and beyond.

Step One: Change Your Mindset.

It might surprise you that using social media to improve your job prospects doesn’t start with social media itself. You’ll see why that is in a moment.

Fact is, job search is dead.

It may sound drastic, but things have been heading in this direction for years. In 2016, you don’t need a job; you need an opportunity to deliver value.

In boxing, fights are won and lost long before fighters step into the ring – and the same thing happens in careers. Professionals who spend their time trying to prove something and stroke their own egos will have drastically different careers to those who are there to help others succeed, creating value for people and businesses.

Value-adding professionals need to reframe their thinking and career strategies: they have something specific, unique, and in-demand to offer, and it’s time to focus on that, rather than a specific job.

Doing so will significantly elevate the tone of your conversations, and help you see potential employers as collaborators and partners in success, rather than a source of something you desperately need, such as a steady paycheque.

It will also, incidentally, set up a healthy and strong foundation for your social media powered personal branding strategy.

The concept of “job search” is not only done, it’s counterproductive: focus instead on cultivating relationships, exploring opportunities, offering advice and expertise, and connecting to create collaborations.

Step Two: Define Your Value.

Once you’ve made the shift from a ‘getting’ to a ‘giving’ mindset, you need to hone in on what you offer, how it’s unique, and why it matters to target companies.

While you can certainly go it alone, working with a personal branding strategist can be useful, because they’ll push you to articulate value in a way that goes above and beyond job descriptions and experience levels.

For a personal brand to be effective, you need to find that sweet spot where the value you offer matches the pain points of your target companies, and it’s something you actually enjoy working at.

I call this The Golden Triangle, and the best personal branding strategists will help you find it, and then create a unique selling proposition that matches your offering with what the market actually needs.

Of course, personal branding work doesn’t stop once you’ve defined your value. You also have to articulate it.

An effective personal branding strategist will tie your career moves into a cohesive narrative, creating a story-driven approach that shows the value you’ve delivered in the past, and how you can apply that experience to current pain points.

They’ll also arm you with a résumé, LinkedIn profile, business portrait, executive website, elevator pitch, and content strategy: all the tools you’ll need to share your value on social media.

Step Three: Connect With Your Target Market.

In my opinion, most people don’t do networking; they do ‘sliming’ – pretending they have something to offer, when in fact they’re only focused on meeting a thinly disguised need of their own.

Real networking means building lasting relationships from a place of having something genuinely valuable to offer.

A few years ago, I heard about a start-up business coach targeting top executives. Before he signed his first client, he hired a well-connected consultant to introduce him to target clients, asking every single person he met, “what’s your biggest problem, and how can I help you.”

By focusing 100% on adding value, and asking nothing in return, he quickly established a viable and wildly successful business, earning loyal, high-value clients that knew first-hand the depth of his insight.

I’m not saying you need to go to such extremes, but when it comes to digitally-driven job search, opportunity seekers are better served by approaching connections and meetings from an ‘offering’ rather than a ‘taking’ perspective.

And once you’ve built your brand, understand the specific value you can offer, and have a professionally written resume which works in conjunction with your social media presence to articulate it, you’ll be in a much stronger position to do just that.

Step Four: Become A Broadcaster.

Building your personal brand with face-to-face networking will only get you so far.

Even if you’re creating value and building relationships with 10 highly targeted people in your market, there’s a thousand more professionals and businesses that could benefit from your expertise and offering, if only they’ve heard of you.

That’s where creating your own content comes in.

Few businesses can get away with not having a content marketing strategy these days, and the same goes for professionals who are looking to position themselves within an increasingly competitive market.

Content – blog posts, social media updates and editorials – serves two purposes:

1. Top of funnel brand awareness. The more of your content is shared, the more eyeballs you have on your personal brand, and the more chances the right people will strike up a relationship with you.

2. Brand communication. Content provides potential employers, recruiters and clients with an extra touch point through which they can get a feel for how you think, what motivates you, how you work, and what your values are. It also gives you a chance to demonstrate how much you know.

It’s at this point in my business – creating actual marketing strategies to promote the personal brands we’ve created – that I often get resistance from clients.

I get it: creating content eats into your time.

However, it’s important to remember content can be infinitely leveraged: it continues to work for you long after you’ve written the piece.

To me, spending 4 or 5 hours to broaden my reach from 10 to 10,000, or more, with no time limit on the benefit, is a no-brainer.

Step Five: Pay For Reach (Optional).

This is where your personal branding strategy starts to mirror that of a major brand, reaching targeted audiences you’d otherwise have no access to.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Google give you the option to “promote” your content straight into social media feeds and search results of highly specific audiences.

They will, of course, charge you for it – so in order to avoid throwing money into the wind you’ll have to know what you’re doing and be strategic in your approach.

I recommend reverse-engineering the process to optimize results:

1. Define the objectives:

• Who is my target audience?
• What are their pain-points and challenges?
• What content alleviates those?

2. Create a piece of content to meet the objectives.

3. Create a targeted paid social media campaign.

4. Keep an eye on people who like, share, retweet, and comment on your content.

5. Initiate relationships with those people by offering real value to solve their core problems.

Let’s say you’re a VP, Customer Happiness who has led multiple cultural transformations over the course of your career, creating ground-up customer cultures across several organisations.

You’re ready for your next challenge, and are willing to give paid social media – powered personal brand building a try.

• Block out 10 – 20 hours of your time – about 2 hours per day.

• Begin by writing a guide to building customer-focused cultures that shares your expertise and could help other organisations. Put your heart and soul into it and make sure it’s a showcase piece by drawing upon personal experience, including research and case studies, and sharing stories.

• Upload it to your LinkedIn profile as a post.

• Create a paid LinkedIn advertising campaign, targeting senior business leaders in your region, or executives at a specific company, if you know where you want to work.

• Run the campaign for 1 week. It should cost $300-$1000, depending on targeting.

• When the campaign ends, open your blog post and check out the statistics to see who shared, liked, and commented on the post.

• Plan to follow up. No one likes a spammer, and you don’t want to be remembered for the wrong things, so before you make contact, do your homework. Who are they, and what challenges are they dealing with at the moment?

• Follow up with a LinkedIn InMail, directly addressing their needs and sharing the value you can offer in your message.

If you’re balking at the time and financial investment, consider another scenario: you’re a Consultant invited to speak to a captive audience of 100 C-suite execs at a Future of Customer Relations seminar in NYC, but you’d have to take a few days away from billable work to prepare and travel.

Would you do it?

I’m guessing you’d say yes.

The thing is, in the age of content marketing and paid promotion, you don’t need to speak at conferences to reach those executives.

And if you’re smart about it, you can probably do it for less than the cost of the lost billable hours.

Key Point To Remember.

If you ask me, 2016 will be the year in which network-based ‘fall in your lap’ opportunities start to decline.

To remain competitive, professionals who are serious about their careers will need to take control of their personal brands and leveraging social media to communicate their unique value in a way that reaches the key decision makers in their field.

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