Gen Z post twice as often on dark social in comparison to traditional social feeds such as Facebook, Jaywing PLC (LON:JWNG) have found in their most recent report. Jaywing commissioned research into 1,000 individuals in the UK aged between 16-21 in collaboration with YouGov. The main findings are available to download free in report ‘Nine Questions Brands Want to Ask about Gen Z – Answered’.
‘Dark’ social is a term that encompasses all social activity that can’t be accurately tracked (Econsultancy). It poses a significant challenge to modern marketers aiming to analyse the ROI of their marketing activities, as it leaves a big question mark over just what’s happening with the content after it disappears into the shadows. The Drum estimate that up to 87% of shared traffic is now done via dark social channels; once the content link is copied and pasted into a messaging app, the referral tags are lost, and the information regarding traffic source is lost (The Drum).
It follows that ‘light’ social consists of those channels we can accurately measure behaviour, traffic flow and ROI from. Examples include display adverts, general website traffic, Facebook adverts, internal link clicks and twitter traffic posts.
Generation Z* have contributed to the growth in popularity of dark social channels. Encrypted messaging applications and image sharing channels allow users to directly relay valuable content to friends and contacts without broadcasting to an audience. Generation Z are typified by their usage of these direct messaging applications, with the most popular being Snapchat – accounting for 14% of total daily app time – and Messaging apps, accounting for 19% of total daily time (below).