Nearly a third of the 80% of global consumers who share content online do so via ‘dark social’, according to new research.

Conducted by advertising platform RadiumOne, ‘The Light and Dark of Social Sharing’ study looks into the sharing habits across all social networks and other messaging platforms in five key markets across North America, Europe and Australia.

Dark social refers to any inbound web traffic coming from sources that web analytics are unable to track. It typically occurs when online content is shared by copying a URL and pasting it into message platforms such as email, forums or instant message, rather than sharing it via established social networks.

Sharing activity through email, instant messaging and forum posts, aka dark social, is three times larger than the sharing activity on Facebook, globally. Some 69% of all sharing activity takes place via dark social globally versus 23% via Facebook.

The study found that social sharing is a cross-channel activity, with 36% of dark social sharing taking place on mobile devices.

Advertisers are achieving impressive results from harnessing and activating dark social data to engage with audiences outside of their owned media properties. Through the use of dark social data, Universal Media Group improved the performance of their programmatic media campaigns by 300%.

Rupert Staines, managing director Europe at RadiumOne said: “Dark social is simply too big to ignore; sharing in the dark outstrips Facebook and all other social channels combined by three-to-one, yet many brands are currently unable to understand this untapped audience.

“Acting on dark social presents a huge opportunity for brands to improve their ROI from their social media and digital marketing investments.”

You can view the full report here.