Is email facing extinction? Will we one day only communicate via social networking sites? These are questions we discussed in class last Friday. While these statements may seem preposterous, according to a comScore report released earlier this year, email usage has been on the decline over the last year while social media site usage has sky-rocketed.
Coincidence? I think not, especially when you look at the change in email usage across different age groups. The decline only occurred amongst People 12-54, while Adults 55+ actually increased their email usage by double-digits. Not surprisingly, the sharpest decline in email usage occurred with Teens 12-17, at a whopping 59% decrease vs. year ago. This is the generation that has grown up on social network sites, so it’s not surprising that they’re rejecting traditional email in favor of Facebook chat or messaging with their friends.
I don’t believe that adults in the working world will be phasing email out anytime soon, but what are the future implications of this trend? As Facebook continues to broaden their offerings (such as with the recent announcements of a music service and skype-powered video chat capabilities), will we one day soon be using Facebook to satisfy all of our digital needs? More importantly, what will happen to email as the current generation of Teens grow up and enter the workforce, considering they already have an aversion to traditional email? I guess only time will tell.
2 comments:
Jen,
I completely agree with your post. Added to the fact that young people are moving away from email towards social media due to a trend (since “everybody” has Facebook) here are some additional reasons for why email may disappear:
1. People now change their jobs more frequently and thus also their email accounts. It’s easier and quicker to keep up conversations via other means, such as Facebook or Linkedin.
2. As spam increases people get even more tired of handling it and as tolerance decreases, people will try to communicate by other means.
3. The proliferation of mobile phones allows for quick phone calls or even text messages. Apparently, not only social networks are a challenge to email but also SMS, since young people have grown communicating almost exclusively by text message.
4. Cloud computing – keeping all the information in a centralized manner – is safer and quicker to use. There is no need to send files through the internet if anybody can access them through their computers.
As you mentioned before, this is more of a generational problem, but it seems that it involves more than a new trend such as Facebook; it is a response to the past performance of email. Email by itself has become complicated, unsafe and overwhelming and in a modern world people will opt for simplicity.
I was coming here to post about just this phenomenon - due to a conflict, I was unable to make class last Friday and haven't yet had a chance to view the lecture, so I didn't realize this was something we already discussed. I went to write my blog post and saw that at least two people have already written about the death of email.
I think Sophia makes really great points. I wanted to add that not only do mobile phones hurt emails prospects by making text messages and social networking easier, but also that it's just a lot harder to write a good email on a cell phone. The main reason I use email now is to communicate with groups of friends about things we are planning - and there are several apps for that, which will make using email to get all of this done a lot simpler. The other reason I use it is to for the marketing - sites like Groupon and RueLaLa that I use communicate through email. This seems to say that email marketing is effective, but in a few years, I bet that things will look a lot different.
Email marketing isn't going away any time soon, but with the proliferation of so many new sites and apps that are competing with email and some that are likely to become very popular in the future, digital marketers need to keep on their toes to take advantage of all of those that make sense.
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