Facebook has recently announced that businesses with applications on the social network will soon be able to ask users for their email address and permission to contact them directly:

“We’re excited to announce that you will soon have the ability to ask users for their primary Facebook email addresses, providing you with a direct channel to communicate with your users”

Currently, applications can communicate with users through internal Facebook notifications, but this doesn’t really provide much opportunity to build a more personalised and direct relationship with users of the social network.

With the new changes to Facebook, application owners will be able to specify optional or mandatory email permissions when users install or use an application. But let’s be clear.  The emphasis here should be firmly on social media and any marketer thinking this is a quick win to getting a new database to blast is mistaken.  Facebook itself has given some advice to marketers on how to most effectively use this new functionality:

“We recommend you use email to send them interesting and relevant information, like receipts for purchases they make, messages to help reactivate them if they haven’t visited your application or integration in a while, or newsletters promoting new features or contests.”

Integration is key

We’ve covered the links between social media and email a number of times on the blog and I wrote earlier this month about a great campaign from Fat Face that utilised the power of email and social media in combination to great effect.

This move by Facebook allows email even greater levels of integration and throws water on the fire that social will be the death of email. The use of social media and email working together (as with other channels) rather than in spite of is just as much a central part of any marketing campaign. This is backed up by Facebook’s announcement that they intend to provide a functional email client.

Of course it goes without saying that the way in which businesses use this valuable data will ultimately dictate how valuable it becomes. Facebook itself has put together a list of fairly stringent rules and regulations that can be found on the developer wiki.

Companies that use this data correctly will be able to elevate the relationship they have with these users. But companies that use this as a way to further bombard contacts with marketing messages, with no targeting or segmentation, will very quickly find the data become useless and, even worse, that users end their relationship with the brand on Facebook and email.