On the heels of the Econsultancy study I wrote about last week comes a new study from Nielsen analyzing the Internet usage patterns of Americans that shows email use is declining in favor of social media.
According to Nielsen, Americans spend 22.7% of their online time on social networking sites, mainly Facebook. That’s almost 14 minutes out of every hour, an increase of 43% over this time last year. Email, on the other hand, only accounted for about 8.3% of time spent online, about 5 minutes of every hour and a 34% drop from what it was last year.
Naturally, this prompted a flurry of somewhat sensationalistic headlines, like this little gem from Reuters: “Nielsen Says – In: social networking; Out: Email.”
Is it really that simple? Can we all scrap our email lists in favor of making new “friends” on Facebook and Twitter? Actually, no. We may be spending less time in our email inboxes, but it’s still the third most popular online activity. (Number two, in case you were wondering, is social gaming. Yes, Farmville and Mafia World et al. are huge time sucks.)
In evaluating the results of the study, even Nielsen made it clear that email’s not out of the game yet:
Despite some predictions otherwise, the rise of social networking hasn’t pushed email and instant messaging into obscurity just yet. Although both saw double-digit declines in share of time, email remains as the third heaviest activity online (8.3 percent share of time) while instant messaging is fifth, accounting for four percent of Americans online time.
To tell the truth, I don’t think that social media will ever unseat email completely. Rather, I think we’re evolving toward a “new normal” in which social sites take over the social functions that email was never particularly good at anyway. For example, sharing photos via email was always a clunky experience, as was planning an event or holding a conversation involving more than one person. On Facebook, all of these things are dead simple. So people will naturally want to spend more time on Facebook and other social networking sites, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll abandon email altogether. To thrive, marketers need to be comfortable using both email and social media to connect with customers.
