I recently saw the chart below from Morgan Stanley showing that social networks have now overtaken email in terms of usage and total users.

Now whilst the global number of users does not look very accurate (See Return Path’s post here for a good look at why); I think a useful takeaway is the upwards trend of both social networks and email. This is very much because there is a place for both. Or to be more clear; the future of email is inside the social networking environment.

What do I mean by this?

Well social networks provides a better visualisation of a user’s network of contacts and the content it generates. It does this by separating different use cases into different areas within the interface. Be it the news feed; the messages box (read email) or the photo area. Here are some of the use cases for social networks today:

1. Sharing content (photos; videos; links)
2. Updating people on your status/short messages notifying your network
3. Managing your network of contacts
4. Managing events
5. Social Gaming

In the past email took over all of these albeit for a smaller network of friends. Yes even Social Gaming – you used to be able to play chess, monopoly and even Civilization over email!

Just imagine receiving everyday in your inbox links to all your friends latest photo albums – whether you were there or not – links to whatever Youtube video they just liked – and dozens of one liner emails (and their friends’ responses) about what they had for breakfast that morning. You know what? Email would be dead under that scenario. It would be unusable.

Social networks allow you to keep track of and interact with a much larger network of people. In theory, though it doesn’t work well today, it should place the content you care about the most in front of you; pushing the rest of the content into a separate view which you can dip into as needed. Messages shift off the screen and disappear unless you actively go looking.

Email’s purpose is therefore changing. A Microsoftie at the Media Post Email Insider Summit recently mentioned that consumers are using Hotmail primarily for business purposes today. That is because the C2C (consumer to consumer) communications have shifted inside the social network already. Over time I see these coming together again or possibly delivering into separate views inside a social network. “New Email” now has a smaller number of reasons to use it but this is a positive. Email was struggling to cope with all the use cases it had before and has now limited to:

1. Private longer form or “letter” type messaging
2. Private attachments (confidential presentations; documents etc)
3. Messages that need to be retained in the future (receipts; vouchers etc)
4. Other business and marketing communications
5. Notifications.

Good marketers understand where their audience is and so ignoring social media opportunities within social networks is a dangerous game; but then so is ignoring email. People still want to receive valuable information from companies they are interested in; they will happily join fan pages on Facebook and still sign up for emails as long as there is value to them in doing so.

Email will move into the social network itself; in fact the seeds have already been planted with Facebook Messages or Twitter Direct Messages. What is next is also clear. Facebook have already announced they are rolling out an email platform; whilst Myspace webmail has already launched.

From a marketer’s perspective; does it matter that the inbox sits within a Facebook account or within a Google account? I think not.

About the Author

Riaz Kanani is Marketing Director at Alchemy Worx. View the full bio here.

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