Ever wanted to know much time we spend on Facebook daily? There’s a statistic for that - 20 minutes worldwide, and double that in the U.S.. Curious about how often the death of Cecil the Lion was googled last year? Your answer is 32 million. In the Internet of Things, almost everything we do is tracked, calculated and stored. It’s never been easier for a company to find out who came to their product via a retweet, who from Facebook and who off their own steam. If data were gold, we’d be in Eldorado.

Yet just beyond the reach of data crunching algorithms, a wealth of online activity has been going ignored. This is Dark Social, the communication that marketers can’t measure. Alex C. Madrigal from The Atlantic, who coined the phrase, likened it to the Internet’s equivalent of dark matter. Email your friend a link instead of posting it on their Facebook wall, or see something amusing you only want one friend to see? That’s dark social. “It’s what keeps the universe expanding,” he quips. And until recently, everyone’s been looking the other way.

Just beyond the reach of data\-crunching algorithms, a wealth of online activity has been going ignored

As it turns out, Madrigal found that 56.6% of The Atlantic’s views come through dark social, three times as much as Facebook. In a 2014 RadiumOne study, close to 70% of all online global referrals were found to come from dark social. In the UK, it was closer to 75%. Key apps in the dark social space include WhatsApp, which boasts 65m users and is the most popular messaging service in India, Mexico and Spain, where it has a 96% market share. Its success is no mystery: free to use and sleeker than clunky SMS interfaces, it makes sharing photos, videos and attachments far more seamless than in an email, especially on mobile phones.

Today, both small startups and big brands are discovering the potential that lies in dark social, and they’re coming up with increasingly innovative ways to use it to market, share and interact with their customers.

Brands go Dark