Dark Posts in Social Media: What is it?

One buzzword currently circling marketing departments is “Dark Post”. It sounds like something dangerous and illegal, probably because you have heard about the "darknet" or the "dark web". However, the two have nothing to do with each other.

Dark posts are nothing unlawful or dangerous; they show up daily in our Facebook feeds. Moreover, the only downside is that they can sometimes be hard to track.

If you are active on Facebook now and then, you know that what you see isn’t only posts from other personal users. Pages - representing everything from your local flower shop, an extremist political party, or an initiative to teach kids to code - can also create posts that show up in your feed.

However, many of the posts in your feed are ads. When a page creates a post on Facebook, it appears both on the page's wall and in some followers' feeds. The page can, if it wants, boost the post to reach more people. Then they pay Facebook to show the post to Facebook users they want to reach. When this happens, the post technically becomes an ad*. These posts are often called boosted posts.

*If you do not boost your post, it is referred to as an organic post.

You see dark posts all day long

Facebook advertisers want all their ads in your feed to look like any Facebook post. But they also like to send different messages to different users based on what they think each user will engage with. To become relevant or spend their money as effectively as possible, advertisers often create multiple versions of a message. They have different versions of copy, links, and images to find the combination that performs best. This is a standard advertising method called A/B testing.

But brands on Facebook usually don’t want their page wall to show the same post over and over, with slightly different combinations of text, links, and images. So, creating an organic post and boosting it is not a very good option. Instead, they make a large variety of ad posts in Facebook Ads Manager, and Facebook shows you the ad that it is most likely that you will act on.

There's a difference between a boosted post and an ad post created with Ads Manager. Boosted posts appear on the page wall, but ads don't (if you don't want them to). Dark posts are ad posts that don't show up on a brand's page wall. Dark posts live “undercover” or “in the dark” and no one except the ads targeted audience knows about the post. Another name for dark posts is “unpublished posts”.

You can create dark posts on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter. On Snapchat and Instagram, all promoted posts are dark posts. The basic idea is the same across all these platforms, but this text will continue to focus on Facebook.

What a dark post looks like

On Facebook, boosted posts and post ads created in Ads Manager look identical. You can see the “Sponsored” mark directly under the page name when it appears in your feed.

You can only see a dark post if you are in the target audience for the particular ad and it happens to show up in your feed or if you know its direct URL. (You find the URL for a Facebook post by clicking on its timestamp).

Who sees a dark post?

Sponsored posts do not show up randomly. We all see different ads in our feeds, and the same ad doesn't appear to everyone. When a page creates an ad, it decides who to show it to, and it only shows up in their feeds. Targeting is the term for choosing who to reach with an ad.

An ad shows up in your feed because you fall into a group the advertiser wants to reach, either because of your gender, age, or where you live. However, it can also be because you have behaved a certain way online. Facebook uses user data to target ads on its platform. Sometimes, the pages you like or the pages your friends follow are a motive for ad placement. But it is also possible to base targeting on different interests Facebook believe you have, most likely because you have clicked links or viewed videos about a subject.

However, even if the ads are showing up on Facebook, they collect your online behaviour across the internet. Facebook collects data from a vast number of websites. Pages can re-target their web page visitors on Facebook if they have installed a Facebook script called a "Facebook Pixel".

Dark post as a tool to reach niche audiences

Dark posts target particular niche audiences. The main idea is to create an ad and promote it to someone likely to enjoy it. The target user is often a potential customer. Still, dark posts can also be used to persuade voters in a presidential election or to increase streams of a specific Netflix show among existing Netflix users.

For a brand publishing on Facebook, it can be hard to create content that speaks to all your potential customers or fans at once. People are much more likely to engage with your brand if they feel like you are relevant to them, but how can you be of interest to a varied group of potential customers? This dilemma is why dark posts are often part of a successful content strategy.

Since an advertiser has almost complete control over who sees an unpublished post, they can reach multiple audiences at once, with different voices and propositions for each. The people who get the content in their feed do not know they are part of a bucket; they are just happy their Facebook ads are somewhat relevant**.

**Facebook also wants to show people relevant ads. They assign all ads on their platform a score from 1-10 based on their relevance to the target audience. If your ad shows a low relevance score, you can tweak it or its targeting to improve its effectiveness.

Dark posts in Social Media are not good or bad

Dark posts are in some circuits becoming somewhat mythical, a tool used to manipulate people without their knowledge. The name probably isn't helping, especially since only a few know what it is.

The thing that makes dark posts somewhat criticised, or at least met with scepticism in the debate, is mainly two things: 1. Fake (junk) news sites, companies and political campaigns have used dark posts unethically in different ways, 2. It is very hard to track dark posts from an ad account you do not own.

First, the ethical aspects of dark posts

The fact that we can target people in extreme detail while being somewhat non-transparent makes it easy for an advertiser to engage in somewhat questionable or at least unethical activities, either by mistake or knowingly. The regulations are often vague, and there is no established custom around these issues.

Facebook is a profit-driven platform and seems happy as long as it gets paid by advertisers. They have changed some policies related to fake news and ad posts after the storm of criticism that followed both the US presidential election and Brexit. With the new EU regulation GDPR, arriving in 2018, this will probably change.

Second, transparency

Keeping track of what others are saying might seem like a vague argument against dark posts. Targeting ads have always been part of marketing and communication. But the vast amount of ads and the difficulty of tracking them make it complicated. This grey zone is not a big deal when it comes to shoe sales, but if it is false political arguments spreading in the dark, it is somewhat problematic when they cannot be met or debunked.

It is also likely that we will see more tools for tracking dark posts, driven by increasing demand from marketers to monitor competitors. We can probably also expect greater transparency on Facebook and other digital platforms, both regarding dark posts and different types of online targeting. Facebook is trying to become an infrastructure platform, not just a social platform, but for that to happen, society needs essential insight into users' daily lives on the platform.

Should we be worried?

As with all tools, dark posts in the wrong hands can create some damage. However, it is not a dangerous tool in itself. If we keep spreading knowledge about how dark posts work and how to check whether the messages we get online are really true, we don't need to be afraid.