I think the market can see the value and requirements to be as Search Marketers looking at strategies to integrate a social product as a string to the bow and be able to offer advertising insight to tap into a new market place.
I have always been trying to quantify the value of taking the time to position some marketing solutions and some statistics published yesterday by Hitwise really hit home the culture change here in the UK.
For the fist time last month, UK visits to social network websites was more than visits to web-based email services. The Hitwise chart below shows, a line for social networks, which includes Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, accounted for 5.17% of all UK Internet visits, compared to 4.98% for Email, which includes Hotmail; Yahoo! Mail and Gmail as the main factors.
This gives some real concrete information that Social has had a very speedy growth within the UK market and all projections say it will continue to climb as the mentality it seems is to drop your friends a quick Facebook message rather than send them an email these days.
For me the ironic thing is that you get an email notifying you when you have received a Facebook message.
So on that basis email can never die! ;0)
Do the email stats include email alerts that I get saying that you have sent me a message on Facebook, to which I then have to log in to Facebook to reply, instead of you just emailing me?!
ReplyDeleteHi Mel
ReplyDeleteThat is what I was thinking in the last few lines of my thoughts. It is a little grey in the stats but, Hitwise say they are statistics for web based email programs. So everyone that has used a Yahoo mail, Hotmail or GMail account for their Facebook login will be getting alerts of entries on their Facebook account and feeding the email numbers, which I felt was a bit ironic.
I am sure that people will have also used non web based email or are just entering messages directly and that will be the areas feeding the Social Site figures and not blurring the email numbers.