Email Used More Than Social Networking!
While Social Media continues to explode around the planet, attracting all the attention and getting businesses keen to jump into the conversation, a recent survey reveals that for some groups, email is still their number one way of keeping in touch.
Doubtless, this finding will draw a smug, ‘I told you so’, from those businesses and organisations who doggedly stick with their fax machines, snail mail franking, IE6 browsers and dial up broadband!
But joking aside, social networking as an integrated social, business and personal communication tool is of course, not about to go away, more a case of email, having itself never really gone away, is reaffirmed as very much still here and booming, e.g. email marketing newsletters.
The survey, from Microsoft Advertising, reveals that young males who have completed their education but not yet started a family are, not unsurprisingly, heavily engaged with technology and always online. The constant use of technology - causing the blurring of work and play – means they are increasingly flexible in terms of managing the work/life balance.
The findings have implications for b2b and b2c work related networking amongst young men in their 20s and 30s, and above – where the possibilities for viral online marketing anytime, are typically at their most intense. Of the men surveyed, 43% admitted occasionally browsing the internet during afternoons at work, yet checking work email in the evenings, on the way to and from work and before getting out of bed in the morning!
In the last few years, the popularity of social media has been seen talked of as heralding the death of traditional social email. Yet email remains the most valued online tool amongst the group surveyed, with over half rating it above all others (compared with 25% for search and 12% for social networking sites) and 87% stating their email use had stayed the same or increased over the last year. Significantly, 94% use email at least once per day, compared with 60% who use a social network.
The internet is the technology with which over half of the respondents are most attached to – with the majority (99%) claiming to go online either every day or nearly every day – closely followed by mobile phones ( just under a half).
With the advent of GoogleWave and Realtime search and update functions joining hands across email, online and mobile, issues of website accessibility, instant feedback and eCommerce become more critical.
After all, who knows who will be emailing with a link to your website …
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Great tips here combined with great material. It’s great to see articles written with insight that are also accessible to industry participants across the board. The subject knowledge and attention to detail here also helped to clear up a lot of the confusion that exists on the topic. Well done.
Comment by website seo — February 24, 2010 @ 9:36 pm
microblogging is really useful when you want to broadcast short updates. i am still leaning towards traditional blogging.;;~
Comment by Imogen Cooper — May 1, 2010 @ 1:39 pm