A dark post is a paid social media ad that doesn’t appear in the account’s regular feed – it is only served as an ad to a specific target audience. Anyone visiting the profile won’t see it.

In influencer marketing, brands often use dark posts to promote an influencer’s content in a targeted way – for example through whitelisting or as a partnership ad via the creator’s account. This lets them test different versions without cluttering the feed.

As an influencer, dark posts are an additional use of your content and often of your name, because the brand runs your content as ads without it appearing in your feed. This must be explicitly covered in your contract and paid for separately, including duration, budget range and territory. Without such an agreement, the brand may not simply run your content as an ad.

See also: Target audience, Advertisement, Whitelisting, Creator.