The Impact of the New Facebook Messages on Email Marketing

Nov. 23, 2010

Recently Facebook announced their new messaging system to the world, and while it won’t be made available in Canada yet, if your business has an international scope it will affect your marketing, especially your email marketing strategy.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, there are currently 4 billion messages sent through Facebook on a daily basis and because of that, Facebook feels that a “modern messaging” system will be a “seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple and minimal,” solution, but he also wants to make it very clear that, “it’s not email,” (despite the fact that Facebook is offering facebook.com email addresses to all of its users).

Facebook has said that the messaging system is split into three sections: Seamless Messaging, Conversation History and the Social Inbox and is designed so that the user can, “decide how [they] want to talk to [their] friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages.”

How does Facebook Messages work?
We’ve heard this new system called everything from “simple,” to calling it the new Google Wave or the more dire title of, “Gmail killer,” but how does it actually work? And what is it going to do to the way you approach email in your marketing?

First, it’s important for us to say again that Facebook Messages isn’t going to be available for everyone for quite a while, especially those of us over here in Canada, but, if you’re one of the lucky users who’ve managed to get an invite to try out the service, it will have the following features:

The social inbox will be split into three separate folders: Messages, other and junk. The first two folders will contain messages sorted either by, “friends,” “friends of friends,” or “everything else,” (including newsletters, promotional emails etc). The nice thing about this is that regardless of who you give that email address to, you don’t actually have to address any emails from anyone you don’t personally know or have as a friend if you choose not to.
Messages that you send from Facebook will be received through, “whatever medium or device is convenient for [the recipient] and you can both have a conversation in real-time.” That saves users from segmenting their lists based on different user preferences for communication.
Messages can be configured to bounce emails that aren’t exclusively sent from users on your friend list. That means that if someone chooses to adopt a facebook.com email address and move away from other email service providers, it may be almost impossible for you to contact them in the future.
The messages system will have a joint inbox for messages sent via chat, email or SMS so you can get your entire conversation history with your contacts, no matter where the conversation occurred all in one place.

What does this mean for marketers?

Social media are becoming more dynamic and integrated channels and, because of this, it is becoming more important than ever to ensure that your marketing messages are consistent and appropriate across multiple mediums and communication platforms.

Designing interactive messages. Social media are currently built around the idea of immediate interaction and real-time communication. With the advent of tools like Facebook Messages, it will be important that all of your communications are more interactive as well. You’ll want to make sure that you have a response system in place whether you are sending email, chat or SMS marketing messages.
Improve your communication skills. Are you communication skills up to the task of dealing with a service like this? It’s no longer viable to communicate differently to different audience through email and social media. Your messages now need to be relevant and consistent to your entire audience.
Higher spam filters will require increased consumer trust. If your emails are now blocked more effectively your audience will need to have a high degree of trust in your organization to choose to accept communications from you.
Immediate and future list hygiene issues. With user@facebook.com email addresses now being made available to all Facebook users are your email lists still going to be accurate? Deliverability issues may be caused because your recipients are switching their new Facebook email addresses. You can try to avoid this by sending out some re-engagement campaigns targeted at encouraging users who are considered switching their email addresses to re-subscribe with their new information.

It will take some time to see the full effects that Facebook Messages has on email marketing. With the rollout being so gradual it will be difficult to see the repercussions of this new technology immediately and it’s entirely possible that the platform won’t be as popular with users as Facebook is hoping. Do we think that Facebook Messages will kill email? No. Will it change the way that we market using email? Possibly. We’ll have to just wait and see. In the mean time, if any of you have tried the platform we’d love to hear your opinions and reviews!

Posted by Amberlie Denny at November 23, 2010 8:00 AM