Barlo | Inbound Marketing Agency Dublin, Digital Marketing, Website design, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Brand Strategy

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14 March 2017

Will Email be replaced by social media?

email 1

As social media usage soars and on-line collaboration tools become more available and inhabited, we have seen a shift towards these social media platforms to try alleviate the burden of enterprise email overload. But does it spell the end for the most powerful business application email?

We don’t think it’s as simple as yes/no. Email remains a very powerful enterprise app. and is an excellent 1:2:1 communication.

Recent research found that knowledge workers report:

  • 81% that email is critical to business
  • only 33% say IM is
  • and 19% say Twitter is

Email is still the preferred application for:

  • document exchange (91%)
  • meeting arranging (84%)
  • information requests (88%)
  • sharing views (77%)

But the overload reality of email has caused a desire to look for change. Recent studies have shown that 25% of a workers day is spent managing email - this is really frustrating.
We will all be familiar with the following list of email problems

  • managing volume of mail
  • ‘always on’ culture
  • spam volume
  • 'copy all’ and 'reply all’ culture
  • growing length and complexity of email
  • file sharing via email

Social media functionality, which concentrates on content and community can help reduce much of the existing traffic across traditional email.

Collaboration:
The changing nature of the way we collaborate is at the heart of these changes. Will this change in collaboration result in the end of email or will we see a future where email and social media converge?
We have mentioned that email is unsurpassed at 1:2:1 communication. But social media can bring real benefits to businesses in relation to real-time collaboration and communication.
The social web and smartphone culture has had a dramatic effect on our expectations and usage. Users are ultimately after solutions that are simple and intuitive. Their preference will be to work across a single familiar application rather than multiple platforms.

Opportunity:
Is the real opportunity to see the functionality and collaborative features of social media communications integrated with email to create a flexible environment which can deliver the right functionality within a familiar interface? In principle - yes. While integrating these types of features and experiences into legacy platforms will be very difficult. It is a realistic goal to develop newer richer featured communications applications which can deliver the best in email and social media collaborative functionality delivered through a user friendly UI experience.
Social business will have to be integrated into business solutions. To date 78% of business people who use social media say that it has not reduces their reliance on email in dealing with customers. So clearly we are not in an either email or social media scenario yet.

The future will be applications that can deliver

  • social file sharing
  • richer user profile
  • activity and micro blogging streams
  • access messaging from other applications
  • real-time communication and collaboration
  • any device
  • integration of public social networking
  • social calendar integration

Applications that deliver this will help business users to better manage their time and make them more productive.

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