Dark social is traffic to your website that comes from sources that can't be tracked in your analytics.

Every time you share a link in Messages.app, or Snapchat, or in a private chat room, you are engaging in dark social.

These conversations can't be indexed by search engines. Your links open up directly in the browser and don't have any referral data. Marketers are somewhat worried because the amount of traffic coming from dark social is increasing.

What does this mean for you as a creator? Well, a lot of things. It really just harkens back to the principles of word of mouth. We will revisit 7 ways to encourage more word of mouth referrals in this episode.

But beyond just being aware that people are sharing links to your content in places that can't be tracked, you should also be engaging with these people one-on-one as much as possible.

As things have become increasing automated and people are scheduling social media posts now, we are understandably yearning for personal interaction. Actually engaging with someone in real time, one-on-one, is incredibly powerful.

Of course, that kind of engagement doesn't scale. But it doesn't matter. You need to be doing the unscalable things.