A recent study by Nielsen Online shows that people are spending more of their online time on social networking websites such as Facebook or Twitter than on checking, composing and sending email. Seemingly as a response to this phenomenon, CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg announced in November this year that plans to combine text messages, emails, and instant messages on Facebook are underway, prompting industry experts to dub this as-yet-implemented new feature as “the Gmail killer”.
Zuckerberg was quick to point out that the product was “not email”. “It’s true that people will be able to have an @facebook.com email addresses, but it’s not email,” he stressed. The new service will be called Facebook Messages and will offer a social inbox and “seamless messaging”, compiling user chatter across four platforms: SMS, instant messaging, Facebook private messages, and emails.
It seems like a move in the right direction. Facebook’s reputation as the #1 time sink in America has already been proven. More people check into it these days to get their news and updates than they do to check email. Important information gets disseminated to Facebook faster and to more people. While it’s true that 3G access and smartphones have made access to the Internet easier for many, most of them aren’t checking their emails every five seconds unless they’re expecting important things to come through their inbox. They are, however, checking Facebook.
What does this mean from a marketing perspective? It may be time to change the game’s focus from email marketing to Facebook instead. Gone are the days of thinking that Facebook is nothing but a teenager fad – the social networking juggernaut has proven time and again that its usefulness doesn’t only lie in keeping people in touch with each other.
Greater visibility on Facebook might be a better idea for young, hungry-for-hits startup websites and blogs. For one thing, Facebook hits people when they have time to spare – people log into the website when they’ve got nothing better to do, allowing for information absorption on a more casual level, whereas emailing is a more focused activity. Send out an email newsletter and it’s possible that the message will make it straight to the intended’s Spam folder, no matter how interesting it is.You have a lot more assurance of getting your content read over Facebook, as the process is organic: land on someone’s feed, and that person will go “oh that’s kinda cool”, increasing your chances of getting clicked on than bypassed.
Using Facebook as a medium also facilitates two-way conversation between you and your audience, and your audience amongst themselves. Never underestimate social power: a community of even 100+ users having a conversation with each other is a great thing to have, not just because of the number of hits, but also because it can be a forum where you can gather great user-generated content.
Social media allows for freedom of expression. Instead of needing to come up with a topic for an entire email, all you have to do is come up with something short and interesting. The impersonality of an email is its biggest weakness – what you really want is a medium wherein you can make yourself available to prospective clients, approachable to your target audience, and appear like a real person, not a brand name.
Until then,
Andy “Going Snail Mail” Jenkins
