Dark Social For Lawyers: How To Track What You Can’t See

“Dark social” can easily conjure images of sinister figures holding clandestine meetings by dead of night. As dramatic as the term sounds, the reality is far more mundane. Dark social is a catchall term for the many digital communication tools that are intended for private conversations between individuals or within small groups, and these socials are “dark” not because there is anything nefarious in the tools or their use but because activity carried out in this way is very difficult for businesses to “see” in the kind of detail that marketing professionals tend to prefer as they develop content strategy for their clients. For law firms, dark social activity tends to mimic the “word of mouth” marketing that has been so invaluable for so long; however, the “reputation” your firm is developing through dark social traffic is much harder to identify. There are a few tricks an astute digital marketing professional may suggest to try and get a sharper picture of what is working for your law firm, how, and why.

Strictly Confidential

Thanks to the kinds of services law firms primarily provide, most clients do not want to broadcast to the world at large exactly what an attorney has done for them. At the same time, in many instances clients who are pleased with the outcomes of their legal matters and especially with the way a particular firm handled a difficult situation will be happy to recommend the same law firm to friends or associates. Similarly, within social networks it is not uncommon for friends or family members to try and help one another out by doing the “leg work” of locating attorneys in relevant practice areas in or near the city where an individual in need of legal services resides.

Many of these recommendations and referrals will take place online, rather than face-to-face or in voice calls. Digital communication formats such as text messaging (SMS, MMS, RCS), email, and even work-optimized platforms such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, facilitate the immediacy of sharing a link directly to a law firm’s website, or even to a specific relevant page, so these modalities often play an important role in total referrals. Activity of this type, however, is difficult to track with any granularity.

Night Vision

Just as night vision goggles allow their wearers to track objects and movements in environments where there is not enough visible light to enable the human eye to discern shapes clearly, there are a few techniques that law firms and their marketing teams can use to trace the “heat signatures” of dark social sharing. Using one or a few of these techniques can make it much easier for your law firm to gain a clear sense of which content is not only performing well on Google and social media apps, but which pieces of content are generating the kind of genuine interest that leads individual human beings to share what they have just found with someone else.

“Zero Party” Data: When Users Tell on Themselves

Often some of the most effective strategies for collecting high-value data from prospective clients comes even before the intake process proper begins. While you should certainly have your intake specialist make a “live” question part of the intake process, make sure that every contact form on your website also asks some version of “How did you hear about us?”

Maintain a database or spreadsheet (or other tool) that tracks the answers; ideally, you would want a selection menu with several radio buttons or checkboxes and an option for providing an original answer if none of the options provided fits. This kind of “zero-party” data collection can be incredibly valuable, in part because the fact that users are giving it to you themselves means they are already, in a sense, explicitly consenting to your access to that information. Another reason the data obtained this way can be especially helpful is that, when you are reviewing and cataloguing responses site visitors provided themselves, you are no longer having to draw inferences from a record of faceless, nameless clicks and traffic triggers. That kind of oblique, aggregated data can be helpful in charting broad patterns and trends, but even at its best it offers significantly less granularity than a direct response from the person at the other end of the internet connection.

Keep It Short ’n’ Sweet

If your law firm already uses any form of link-shortening tool for social sharing, then you may be able to use the redirect technology to identify where the click to the shortened URL originated, even if the data shown in your website’s traffic analytics is a generic “direct” visit. This strategy can be especially useful if you want to run a comparative analysis to see how many total clicks come from each platform. Keep in mind, however, that clicks are not cases; ultimately, you will still need to keep tabs somewhere on how the clients who actually end up in your office are finding you.

Peek Behind the Closed Doors

Most of the time, you can expect a click-through from any search or answer engine to show up as a referral from that source in your traffic analytics (e.g., “referral source = Google,” or “referral source = ChatGPT”). What this means for you, if you are trying to determine where all these “direct” visits are coming from, is that you can often make some educated guesses about at least the type of sharing that brings visitors to your site by creating a filtered view of your analytics page.

Exclude your home page and any landing pages used for specialized, static pieces of content (e.g., your results page, or a page outlining a special offer that operates on an ongoing, rather than limited-time, basis). The pages that are left, the ones with highly specific subjects and granular information about your practice areas, will usually be either those search engine referrals or “direct” visits. The former are obviously accounted for already. The latter, on the other hand, tend to reflect the private sharing of “dark socials” activity.

What To Do With the Information You Collect?

What difference does it make where visitors are coming from, as long as they are visiting your website? Why does it matter which pages they access first? The answers to these questions are related. When we are talking about dark socials, we are looking not just at a referral source, in the way you might think of with Google or one of the AI answer engines. Instead, what we are really seeing (or estimating, from the “shape” drawn from the patterns in site traffic) is an experience.

The Importance of Private Sharing

Private sharing is a strong indication of the content individual human beings (the people who become paying clients) find valuable. Instead of reflecting the most common ways someone skims past your site and decides to click, these dark social shares reflect those tiny moments when someone says, “Hey, I think this is what you were looking for,” or “Thought you’d find this interesting,” or “This sounds like what you were telling me about last week.” Those moments are embedded in human connection and personal significance: the interests and worries and conversations that map out our journey through life. The metrics they leave in their passing are a type of trail sign that, to a skilled digital marketing specialist, tells a story.

Applying Information

Once that story begins to develop some “narrative” coherence, which is to say, “Once a pattern begins to take shape in the data,” your digital marketing specialist will likely have some updated recommendations for your law firm content strategy. These new recommendations are not necessarily a change of direction, much less a sign that your content has been doing anything “wrong.” Law firm content has to start somewhere, and begin by creating pieces of content that align with what your potential clients are known to need and the questions you and your marketing team know they are likely to have.

What reading the trail sign left by dark socials can do for you is tighten the frame. From casting a wide net (which you may still want to do on some level), you are able to develop more pieces of content that line up with the structure or subject matter or professional approach seen in the content that repeatedly gets shared in personal messages, so that your law firm has a chance to become embedded in more and more of those moments that take place where most analytics tools cannot follow.

Keep Your Ear to the Ground

None of the information you collect and track, and none of the information you view in a spreadsheet once or twice and then never use, will ever help you grow your law firm. The novelty and the impressive potential of many digital analytics tools can make it easy to become focused on the function of the tools themselves, rather than on what the information they have helped us gather has to say about your law firm’s performance and where it is reaching, and missing, potential clients. Consider setting up a regular schedule of meetings with your law firm marketing team to review not just dark social traffic, but other metrics to which it might compare. Examine the ratio of dark social to identified referral traffic on individual pages within your site structure. True experts in digital marketing are almost always happy to be asked for their insights; share with them the repeated questions you get from clients and let them match those questions against your site traffic to inform an increasingly targeted content strategy.

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Annette Choti, Esq., has over two decades of legal experience and is the Founder & CEO of Law Quill, a concierge legal marketing agency for law firms.  Annette authored the bestselling book Click Magnet: The Ultimate Guide To Digital Marketing For Law Firms, hosts the popular Legal Marketing Lounge podcast, and founded Click Magnet Academy where she teaches professionals to leverage the powerful LinkedIn platform. As a sought after speaker for Bar Associations, Legal Associations, and Marketing Conferences, Annette provides legal marketing insight along with an entertaining twist. Annette used to do theatre and professional comedy, which is not so different from the legal field if we are all being honest. Annette can be found on LinkedIn or directly through email at [email protected]