Dark posts are advertising posts that are shown only to targeted audiences and are not published on the brand's profile. They serve two purposes. The first is keeping the profile clean – a company can test dozens of text and visual variants at once without followers being swamped by repeated posts. The second is targeting, since different wording of the same offer can be sent to different segments without them seeing each other's version. The risk is losing track: the posts are not publicly findable on the profile, so without internal records nobody knows after a while what is running and with what wording. Keep a record of active variants, and bear in mind that ads tend to be findable in the platforms' public ad libraries.
See also: Creative fatigue, Organic reach, Multivariate testing.
