Facebook Thinks Email is “Probably Going Away”

Could Facebook Even Survive Without Email?

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Facebook thinks email is dying. Classic. How many times have we heard this now? Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg gave a speech at the Nielsen Consumer 360 conference recently, essentially claiming as much.

Do you think email is dying? Comment here.

“In consumer technology, if you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today, and the latest figures say that only 11% of teenagers email daily. So email (I can’t imagine life without it) is probably going away. So what do teenagers do? They SMS and increasingly they use social networking.” (hat tip to WebGuild.org)

First off, Facebook couldn’t exist without email. You need an email address to sign up and to log-in. Many of us rely on email for notifications from Facebook to know when someone has sent us a message, commented on our posts, invited us to an event, tagged us in a photo, etc. In fact, I’d be curious to see how frequently the average Facebook user would come back to Facebook daily without email notifications.

Email lubricates social interactions on Facebook, and I’d be very curious to see how successful Facebook would be without any email integration. I suspect it would die.

To be fair, Sandberg was looking to the future, and not the present when she made this claim. She even said that she couldn’t imagine life without email. It’s interesting, because Facebook is in some ways helping keep email relevant for the reasons mentioned above (though email certainly doesn’t need Facebook’s help to stay relevant).

Facebook requires you to use email to sign-up and log-in, but we are seeing more and more open protocols being used around the web for ID authentication. There are also not-so-open protocols in use, like Facebook Connect. I can log-in to a wide variety of sites/apps with my Facebook ID, but I can’t log-in to Facebook with anything other than my email address. If Facebook thinks email is dying, does that mean it will adopt some other open authentication protocols? Don’t these protocols generally come back to having an email address in the first place anyway?

We’ve written about why social media isn’t killing and will not kill email several times in the past. I don’t want to rehash all of the same points here, so I’ll simply reference a couple of these articles:

- 10 Reasons Social Media isn’t Replacing Email
- Spam Will Not Keep You Away from Email

The popularity of specific social networks comes and goes, but email has been around for a while, and has really shown no signs of going anywhere. Here’s something to consider – how many years has your inbox been flooded with spam? Has it caused you to use email any less? Granted, Facebook does continue to grow, even in the face of massive privacy concerns, but that’s hardly an indication that it could replace email. Sandberg didn’t suggest Facebook itself would replace email, but that SMS and social networking in general would. We’ll see. If Facebook hopes to be a significant part of that replacement on the social networking end, they’re probably going to have to play a little nicer with the open web movement.

I’ll come back to the conclusion we always reach. There is room for both email and social networks. Just like there is now, there will be in the future. As far as marketing is concerned, social networks appear to be greatly enhancing email campaigns. A recent study from GetResponse found that campaigns utilizing these networks were able to increase click-through-rates by 30%.

Report: Most Small Businesses Still Not Sold on Social Media

Many Businesses Still Ignoring Social Networks

Citibank put out a new report indicating that most small businesses still are not leveraging the social media tools available to them, despite the “relentless buzz” around them.

Are you ignoring social media? Tell us why.

According to the survey of 552 small business executives across the United States, in the last year 37% of small businesses haven’t used a Web site for marketing or expanding their business and 84% have not used ecommerce to sell their products or services. 62% aren’t using basic email for marketing their business.  Yet among those businesses that do have a Web site, 74% say their site has been effective at generating more business.

“Many small businesses today have yet to really harness the marketing and communication power that online tools can provide them,” says Raj Seshadri, the head of Small Business Banking at Citibank. “Our survey reveals a huge opportunity for many businesses to begin using some of the basic online tools, such as email marketing, to drive their sales.”

65% of small businesses are not placing online ads to expand their business and 67% have not used search engine optimization, according to the survey.

Other Noteworthy findings include:

- 72 percent say they are likely to use a Web site for marketing or expanding their business in the next 12 months – up 14% from those who do today.

- 24 percent will likely use ecommerce to sell their products or services online over the next 12 months – up 50% from those who do today.

- 30 percent say they intend to use social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter for marketing or expanding their business – up 58% from those who do today.

“This survey shows that many small businesses have yet to add new tools to traditional marketing methods that they have found effective in the past,” said Seshadri. “This may be because the online world does not fit their business model or other factors such as inexperience with technology or lack of time to effectively enter these marketing channels.  It’s encouraging, however, to see that many intend to utilize more of these tools in the next 12 months.”

According to Citibank, there is a disconnect regarding the importance placed on word-of-mouth marketing by small businesses.  63% say word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective way to market their business and find new customers, but interestingly many don’t view social media as a word-of-mouth channel. 81% say they have not used social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.

Among those not using social media sites, 47% don’t think these networks have value to their business. 21% think they’re more for personal than business use, and 18% don’t know enough about how to use them.

Michael Stelzner, founder of SocialMediaExaminer.com released another interesting report this week, finding that 22% of marketers were just getting started with social media marketing and another 43% had only been doing it for a few months.

Twitter Gives 3 Huge Reasons for Businesses to Use Twitter

19 Billion Searches Per Month, 105 Million Users, 100,000 Apps

If you truly feel that not using Twitter for your business is the way to go, then don’t use it. However, Twitter dropped some pretty interesting statistics at its Developer Conference, which may perk your ears up, if not make you reconsider your position.

1. Twitter Gets 19 billion Searches Per Month.

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan spoke with Twitter CEO Evan Williams who says Twitter gets about 19 billion searches per month. If you compare that with comScore estimates for the major search engines (as Sullivan did here, along with all the caveats that come with that), that puts Twitter in 2nd place, just behind Google – ahead of Yahoo and Bing.

Where Twitter ranks in searches compared to the search engines really isn’t the point. The point is that people are using Twitter and Twitter apps A LOT to find information. I think you can see where this could be useful to know from a business standpoint. By the way, Twitter also just announced a little thing called “Promoted Tweets” – ads that will initially show up for Twitter searches.

2. Twitter has over 105 million users.

Last week, Matthew Daines, the lead developer of our own Twellow did some math and suggested that Twitter had probably surpassed 100 million users. It turns out he was right, because Williams said at the conference that Twitter actually has over 105 million, and adds about 300,000 a day. Once again, I think you can see why this might be of interest.

3. There are over 100 thousand registered Apps

There are so many Twitter apps out there that are making Twitter usable and more efficient to people. There are apps that shape Twitter around a person’s specific needs. This no doubt plays a huge role in Twitter’s growth, which will continue. It also means there are a lot of ways you can use Twitter yourself as a business.

At WebProNews, we recently revisited a Twitter app directory called OneForty. Now this directory has only a fraction of that 100,000 apps listed, but there are nearly 2,700, and that’s still plenty. They are broken down into categories like advertising, analytics, business, email, mobile, monitoring, networking, shopping, etc. There is no question you will be able to find some useful apps there or in another Twitter app directory.

Consultant Drives 90% of Her Business from Facebook

In my last article, I asked, “Is Facebook as important to your strategy as Google?” Whether your answer    to this is yes or no, there are a variety of reasons why Facebook can be a useful part of your mix. I was looking at an article I wrote about a year ago about driving traffic to your site with Facebook, and I noticed a comment left last month that tells an interesting story.
Allow me to pull an excerpt from the comment. A consultant named Heather O’Sullivan Canney talked about the reasons she created a Facebook page and why it has helped her business:

As a result (IMO) of creating the page with the INTENTION of engaging and not merely as an advertising platform, I now receive nearly 90% of my business via facebook. Even those who I know personally in my local market, and network with on a daily basis, hire me as a result. They often say “I didn’t really think I needed you, but I was sitting there stressing out about my marketing plan and there you were…” (or something along those lines).

I don’t sell internet marketing products Chris, although as my international fan base continues to grow as a result of facebook, I am being asked to create online products.

The key (IMO) is having the intention of building a community, and engaging with them. Nobody wants another place to be advertised to in the ‘in your face’ sense of the word. We want to buy things, and we need to know that they exist, but we want to buy – not ‘be sold to’.

Let’s not get too consumed in the Facebook vs. Google aspect. It is an interesting discussion, but there are no rules (luckily) saying you have to use one and not the other. They are both your friends. And they both provide different ways of getting your business and your message found by potential customers.

As long as I’ve brought it up,however, Facebook does appear to be coming quite the competitor to Google. This week, Nielsen shared some data about time spent online by U.S. Internet users, and the average Facebook user spends about seven hours a month on Facebook. The average Google users spends about two.

It is true that you don’t have to spend much time on Google if it is doing its job right (at least with regards to the search engine), but the fact that  Facebook is where people already are for that amount of time says a lot about its potential. On top of that, Facebook continues to find new ways of keeping users around even more.

Is Facebook a waste of time? It can be, but not to everyone. It’s how you use it. As I mentioned in a comment on the article I linked to above, you can waste a lot of time on Google too. It comes down to personal discipline.