A dark post is a social media ad that appears only for a specific set of users and nowhere else. Such sponsored content is not published on the sponsor’s page or feed and does not display organically in the sponsor’s followers’ feeds. As a result, these ads can be highly targeted and give sponsors the option to generate a large number of them without cluttering the sponsor’s or followers’ feeds.
Dark posts are also referred to as “unpublished page posts”, “promoted-only tweets” or “direct sponsored content” on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, respectively.