Study: Social Media Increases Email Usage

email

If social networks are truly transforming how consumers communicate, shouldn't they be affecting the Web's original killer app: email?

Not at all, according to preliminary data from Nielsen. To the contrary: "It actually appears that social media use makes people consume email more, not less, as we had originally assumed -- particularly for the highest social media users," says Jon Gibs, VP of media analytics at Nielsen.

Why? Well, social media sites like Facebook send messages to users' inboxes every time someone comments on their posting, or something they have participated in -- and depending on their settings, can send updates on almost every activity.

Also, according to Gibs, "it's perfectly logical that as people make connections though social media, they maintain those connections outside of the specific platform and may extend those connections to email, a phone conversation or even in-person meetings."

For the study, Nielsen broke the online population into four groups: three "terciles" of social media consumption in minutes, along with a group that doesn't use social media at all. It then looked at each segment's time of Web-based email consumption over the course of a year, then subtracted the email consumption of those who do not use social media from those who do -- to show a lift over possible external forces.

"Clearly, there are more robust approaches that could be taken (controlling for factors other than consumption for example) but for the sake of this simple experiment, we tried to keep it straightforward," said Gibs.

For marketers, email remains an extremely powerful tool. Indeed, the Direct Marketing Association just projected that email marketing will generate an ROI of $43.52 in 2009 -- twice the return earned by search and other marketing channels.

The next step for Nielsen, according to Gibs, is to take a more robust approach to develop correlations between platforms to understand whether this relationship is different across specific demographics and behavioral groups -- rather than by levels of consumption.

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