How Social Networking Keeps You Connected
When you are on a social network site such as Twitter, is that causing you to spend less time emailing? Here’s a Nielson study that found an unexpected result.
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Despite an initial hypothesis that increased time on social networks might be taking Americans away from their email, a Nielsen Company analysis found that the heaviest social media users actually use email more, perhaps because of the steady stream of messages that social networks dump into participants’ inboxes.
For the informal research, Nielsen broke the US internet population into four groups, three that were based on increasing levels of social media consumption and the fourth comprised of non-users of social media.
Nielsen then examined the amount of time that each group spent on email in the year before the study, and subtracted the email consumption of those who do not use social media from those who do in order to account for possible external forces.
The April 2009 study found that social media use appears to makes people consume email more, not less, particularly for the heaviest social media users. However, among those who use the least amount of social media, the opposite is true:
Jon Gibs, VP of media analytics for Nielsen, said that these findings intuitively make sense because social media sites such as Facebook send numerous and periodic status-update and notification messages to social media users’ email addresses.
Gibs also noted that “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.”
In the future, Gibs said Nielsen plans to examine whether or not this relationship holds up across specific demographics and behavioral groups – rather than by levels of consumption.
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Joining on Social Sites doesn’t make us away from using our emails. I have signed in on different social sites and from what I can see, when a I am notified about someone leaving a comment, message or someone is following me, they also send a notification on my registered email aside from the notification on the website itself. So I can say that using emails are not taken for granted.
Hi, Moreen. Good point. It’s funny, I had thought that email usage was going to drop, but your point and the point made by Ann Priuitt in the blog posting have made me see otherwise.
Best,
Jamie Turner
Hi- It’s a good point. But what do people prefer and does that change according to age and demographics? For example, I’ve worked on graduate recruitment campaigns and we thought the social site was the perferred location for conversations. Emails were more easily ignored.
Any ideas?
Hi, Laura. I suggest that the younger the crowd, the less they rely on email and the more they rely on social media. I recently shut down my 15 year old daughter’s email (because of inappropriate SPAM). When I suggested she open a new, SPAM-free email account, she responded by saying, “Nah. I’ll just use Facebook, Texting and Twitter to connect.”
Admittedly, it was a datapoint of 1, but it might suggest a larger trend.
Any other thoughts/suggestions from our readers?
Best,
Jamie Turner
Well, for me, I’m in the “more experienced” crowd, and if someone contacts me through Facebook, I’m likely to write a note to them in Facebook that’s short and sweet – and public. But I’ll then send them an email with more private, personal detail. I don’t always trust that what I’m sending through social media has the privacy that I’d like. I just trust my email more than this new social media stuff!