The Atlantic has an interesting article on the idea of "dark social" or "direct social," which is the sharing of content over an non-standard social network. This includes sharing a link via gchat or email or something outside the traditional channels of Facebook and/or Twitter. What's interested is that we've come to consider Facebook and Twitter the "traditional" social media outlets, but the act of sharing links has existed well before these two companies.
It turns out that "dark social" is actually a bigger driver of traffic than all other social media channels combines. Only search drives more traffic over the web than "dark social." Yet, it is incredibly hard to actually track this dark social traffic, because there is rarely metadata attached to the referring website. From the company's point of view, the user just showed up independently or via some secure site, which is not classified as social.
This presents an interesting opportunity for companies such at Bitly that offer link tracking. Google has also gotten into the link-shortening game, so it will be interesting to see how this largely unknown area of internet traffic shakes out.
The link to the article is here (shortened with Bitly, of course!): http://bit.ly/V1IE6c
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