“This feels like something that’s right up your street.”

A WhatsApp notification pinged on my phone. It was an ex-colleague (and good friend). It’s always nice to see their name pop up and, as it turned out, they were right. The link they’d shared led to an article from a tech firm in our industry that immediately interested me.

I skimmed it quickly, sent a thank you, and decided to save it for the next morning to read properly over a coffee. Lovely!

On the surface, that tiny interaction is pretty unremarkable. Yet, versions of this exact scenario take place millions of times a day, spanning all seniorities, sharing all kinds of brand and expert-led content. This could look like a product explainer video dropped into a WhatsApp group of industry CMOs, a research report shared inside a private Slack community, or a LinkedIn post forwarded to an ex-colleague with the message saying, “Worth a read”.

All of it sits firmly in what we call dark social, referring to the private, ‘untrackable’ sharing of content through messaging apps and closed environments like WhatsApp, Slack, email, LinkedIn direct messages, and other similar channels.

Dark Social Activity is Increasing

Dark social isn’t new, of course. It’s something we’ve become very familiar with over the years. However, post-Covid, our search behaviours have changed significantly and over the last few years in particular, the increase in remote and hybrid working has driven a growth in private business communities and informal peer networks, especially in senior technical and leadership roles.

At the same time, B2B decision-making continues to be spread across broader committees who share lots of pieces of information with one another as they go through a buying journey. This spans everything from early stage discovery and validation, through to final consideration. All frequently happening in private spaces, helping to form opinions and build confidence to get to the right decision.

Whatever the platform, shares like this stimulate demand and shape opinions in the business-to-business (B2B) industry long before sales teams are even aware their buyer is in-market. By the time marketing teams see “intent”, there will have likely been lots of conversations happening out of sight and any influence you’ve been able to create has often already played its part. The challenge we continue to face as marketers is that very little of this activity reliably shows up in our analytics.

Measurement Bias

Throughout my marketing career, I’ve been trained to measure whatever is possible, study those metrics closely and interpret the signals to build a picture of performance. The challenge with this is it can often subtly nudge B2B marketing strategies towards the use of tactics that are easiest to measure. After all, when we can point to a clear metric, we can justify the activity and defend ongoing investment. It’s a challenge many of us are very familiar with.

The result is that many B2B strategies become heavily weighted towards visible, trackable channels that provide us with data on impressions, clicks, and conversions. It’s not to say these should be ignored, far from it. But with more meaningful conversations happening out of view of our analytics, it’s important to set our content and sharing up for success. 

Strategic Implications

There are several strategic implications to ignoring the rise of dark social activity. The first is underinvestment in tactics and content designed for private sharing in the first place. This can include thoughtful perspective pieces, clear educational explanations or short, practical videos that help someone explain an idea internally.

This disconnect often starts earlier than we’d like to admit. The way influence is understood and valued at a senior level has a direct impact on the kinds of content organisations are willing to invest in.

However, content that’s saved or forwarded carries disproportionate influence. We see this time and time again across our own social media content and our clients too. It does a fantastic job of increasing familiarity, reinforcing credibility, educating our audience and improving mental availability. All healthy components of influencing a B2B purchase. This is demonstrated in some of the metrics but more so in follow-up conversations where specific content is referenced.

If organisations skip this type of content altogether, they miss opportunities to support early stage conversations and later consideration discussions. And when influence is happening out of view, measurement inevitably struggles to cover everything. It’s naturally much more difficult to do any kind of A/B testing, but it’s also easy for teams to see unexplained spikes in direct traffic or brand searches and try to rationalise the source. Frequently, dark social is the missing piece, but it’s difficult to track.

Planning for Influence You Can’t Track

Designing for dark social from the outset can help. When we work with clients on their executive social media strategies, we deliberately use a mix of formats including educational, actionable, personal and promotional where it makes sense. This gives us a richer environment to learn what works so we can capture lots of small signals of resonance that help guide what to focus on next.

Interestingly, LinkedIn has started to acknowledge this behaviour too. Historically, the platform focused on surface-level engagement metrics such as impressions and reactions on posts. More recently, it introduced visibility into saves and sends that happen out of view.

Neither tells the full story as we’re still unable to see who has saved down or shared content, but both offer useful information, helping to indicate that a post was valuable enough to keep, or relevant enough to pass on privately. For leadership teams, these small signals can be strategically more useful than seeing the number of reactions.

Despite scrolling daily, many social media users rarely engage with content publicly (often referred to as “LinkedIn lurkers”) so these darker metrics can be a sign something resonated on a deeper level, even if impressions and external engagement is lower than expected.

Ultimately, we have to accept that not everything can be measured precisely. After all, influence is created out of sight every single day. However, what we can do is intentionally design for it.

That starts with creating content that’s optimised for sharing. For example, it could mean ensuring a piece of content solves or researches a very specific, recognisable problem and is expressed in a way that resonates with your audience. If they were to share this piece of content with a colleague, would it make them look thoughtful, credible or helpful?

Once it exists, any forms of amplification should follow the same thinking.

How Leaders and Employees Can Support Dark Social

Expert-led influence can be extremely powerful as it’s focused on human connectivity and real-life experiences. When a senior leader shares a substantial piece of thinking or perspective, it carries a lot of credibility for their organisation and often builds trust faster than brand messaging alone.

We may never have access to every share, but we can also structure content in a way that increases the likelihood they’ll travel. If we take a social media post, for example. Optimising the post to lead with a memorable quote or an insightful perspective makes it far easier to quote, forward or screenshot. Leaders should also try to anchor their content to their own real-life experiences, helping to encourage resonance with the reader and drive a deeper connection.

Employees can also do a fantastic job at optimising posts for dark social, highlighting the benefit of correct training and tools.

We often see teams encouraged to share refined corporate announcements, but we typically see lower performance across the board when this happens. There’s a lot that goes into an effective employee advocacy programme so that’s likely another article for another day. However, it’s an incredibly powerful way to create and scale influence and when teams are taught to share content in their own words, there’s much more possibility of building trust with audiences, and we typically see shares increase as this type of content feels more natural to pass on. When teams have access to this level of support, employee-led influence can help create a distributed, trust-based network around buyers.

Once leaders and wider teams are actively sharing content, sales and customer teams also play an important role. During their conversations with buyers, encouraging them to capture how prospects first heard about the business, even when the answer is informal, creates valuable qualitative insight.

“A friend sent me a link” or “I read your CEOs’ recent post” is strong (trust-based) feedback and knowing this can help to paint a picture of the type of content that’s performing well and contributing intentionally to the sales process.

The conversations we don’t always see

Marketing has changed dramatically over the last six years and continues to change at speed. It’s a challenge for all of us to keep up but know we’re all experiencing the same barriers but in amongst everything, one thing remains consistent… influence is often shaped in the conversations we don’t always see.

An over‑reliance on historical attribution models can distract teams from the broader picture and the organisations that stand out are those that understand how influence is created and trust is built and shared.

The most effective leaders will be the ones who design content for private sharing, coach their advocates to share meaningfully, and treat influence as something to be shaped.

As much as we would love to see everything tied up neatly on a dashboard, there’s a lot that’s hidden from our view, and as communities continue to pop up, this only looks to continue. But intentionally creating content that’s worth sharing and setting our teams up to share effectively, we can still plan with this in mind and build credible influence with our buyers.

This is the kind of work we do every day at Paper Kite, where we partner with senior B2B leaders to build their influence with the right audiences. If you’re exploring how to build effective influence inside your organisation, we’d love to continue the conversation: www.paperkitemedia.co.uk