During the web's young "dark ages", we didn't have social media websites, but we did have social networks.  We shared stories, photos and links with our "social network" via email [1]

Then Came Facebook

Facebook has now become so monstrous it's almost synonymous with the term "social network." [2]   So it's only natural for artists to market art on Facebook.  If you pay attention to "the numbers", particularly the numbers that track referral traffic to websites, it often seems like Facebook is the biggest, badest mabajamba on the planet.

However, there's a problem with the numbers:  Because Facebook website referrals are public data, you know when someone finds your site from a Facebook link....because it's right there in your analytics.  

Another Look at Dark Referrals

But what about when someone shares a link to your site via email?  You know, like we used to do in the "dark ages"?  Answer: links shared in this manner will very often appear in your analytics as "unknown, direct, or bookmarked."   Which means that, unlike Facebook links, traffic that comes to your site from email is private and you don't know how much you are getting.

Real life example:  I like to send a links to a paintings that I love to my wife via email, so that we can discuss possible purchases.  When she clicks one of those links, that's a social link.  You just don't know it.  But it's not really true that it's "direct" or "bookmarked."  It's just "unknown".

We're going to call this "behind the scenes" social network the "dark social network", inspired by this article in the Atlantic.

How Big is the "Dark" Social Network?

Wouldn't it be great if we had some idea how much traffic came from this dark social network?

Good news:  the analytics company Chartbeat, came up with a clever way to measure traffic that arrives to websites via dark social links and here's what they found:

"Dark social is even more important across this broader set of sites. Almost 69% of social referrals were dark!

Facebook came in second at 20%. Twitter was down at 6%."  [source]

Basically, what they said is this: for most sites, Facebook refers 20% of social traffic, while email and IM refers almost 69%.

Of course, that's what we've been saying for years on this site, we just didn't call it "dark social."

The question you need to answer is this: are you having fun playing with the 20% on Facebook, while ignoring the much larger network of people you can reach via the "dark social network?"

If so, please start utilizing email newsletters to market your artwork ASAP!

Remember, Sharing Art Enriches Life.

Sincerely,

Clint Watson

FASO Founder, Software Craftsman, Art Fanatic

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[1]  Email was known as the "Killer App" of the Internet, just as spreadsheets were known as the "Killer app" of PCs.  And we still share links, stories and photos via email, much more than any other method.  People also shared links in the dark ages via usenet,IRC and instant messages.

[2]  Even the movie about Facebook was called, simply "The Social Network" as if it's the one and only "The" social network.  It's not.

[3] Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vandenbussche_wim/2541905328/