New research, which says it sought to pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture of online data shar­ing habits across all social net­works and mes­sag­ing plat­forms, finds an untapped oppor­tu­ni­ty for brands to engage more close­ly with con­sumers by imple­ment­ing strate­gies that cap­i­tal­ize upon “dark social” shar­ing.

Adver­tis­ing soft­ware com­pa­ny Radi­u­mOne has released new research on “dark social” shar­ing, or what it describes as “any inbound web traf­fic com­ing from sources that web ana­lyt­ics are unable to track.”

Accord­ing to Radi­u­mOne, so-called dark social activ­i­ty typ­i­cal­ly occurs when online con­tent is shared by copy­ing a URL and past­ing it into mes­sag­ing plat­forms like email, forums, or instant mes­sages rather than shar­ing via estab­lished social net­works.

The study, “The Light and Dark of Social Shar­ing – Har­ness­ing the Pow­er of Con­sumer Con­nec­tions,” found that 59 per­cent of all online shar­ing in the U.S. takes place via dark social chan­nels, com­pared to 31 per­cent on Face­book and 10 per­cent on all oth­er social chan­nels com­bined.

Radi­u­mOne says the sur­vey “reveals an untapped mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty for brands to engage more close­ly with con­sumers.”

Addi­tion­al find­ings include: 91 per­cent of U.S. con­sumers – and 93 per­cent of glob­al con­sumers – use dark social chan­nels along­side social chan­nels when shar­ing infor­ma­tion online. Fur­ther, 27 per­cent of U.S. con­sumers exclu­sive­ly share “in the dark,” which Radi­u­mOne says means brands with no dark social strat­e­gy in place know noth­ing about more than a quar­ter of U.S. con­sumers online. And this fig­ure grows to near­ly one-third world­wide, or 32 per­cent.

When con­sumers share via dark social, the top­ics they dis­cuss most fre­quent­ly are “typ­i­cal­ly more one-to-one in nature,” like arts and enter­tain­ment, careers, and trav­el, accord­ing to Radi­u­mOne. The find­ings illus­trate how brands and pub­lish­ers are over­look­ing their audi­ences by lim­it­ing social and mar­ket­ing invest­ment to activ­i­ties that take place on social net­works like Face­book, Twit­ter, and Pin­ter­est, accord­ing to Radi­u­mOne.

CMO Eric Bad­er says con­sumers reveal dif­fer­ent aspects of their intent via pub­lic posts on social net­works, ver­sus pri­vate­ly shared mes­sages in texts, IMs and emails, which can be of val­ue to brands and mar­keters.

“The prod­uct and cat­e­go­ry being shared often changes depend­ing on how it is being shared,” he says. “ ‘Dark social’ shar­ing and pub­lic shar­ing are both valu­able to a brand or mar­keter but ‘dark social’ shar­ing pro­vides a huge amount of data about pref­er­ences, inter­est and inten­tions that mar­keters don’t nor­mal­ly see or get to con­sid­er sim­ply because they don’t have the right mech­a­nisms in place to track and ana­lyze.”

In a state­ment, Radi­u­mOne CEO Bill Lon­er­gan adds, “Web ana­lyt­ics pro­grams miss much of the social shar­ing out­side of the major net­works, but we are able to track this ‘dark social’ activ­i­ty and it’s one of the most valu­able sources of data insights with the poten­tial to give brands a huge com­pet­i­tive edge.”

In addi­tion, Radi­u­mOne found 36 per­cent of dark social shar­ing world­wide occurs via mobile devices, which, per Radi­u­mOne, fur­ther illus­trates “their increas­ing­ly piv­otal role in con­sumers’ dai­ly shop­ping and shar­ing habits.”

The research includ­ed 9,027 con­sumers in North Amer­i­ca, the UK, Europe, Aus­tralia and France. It was con­duct­ed by intel­li­gence mar­ket researcher Tpoll.