What Teens Think Of Email

Earlier this year, AWeber offered a scholarship to the high school or undergraduate college student who best described what they think will happen to email now that social media is demanding so much attention.  

We wanted to know where email marketing may be headed, and what better way to find out than asking the up-and-coming generation? 

Some of their thoughts may surprise you; others just make sense.  Overall, 44% believe email has its place and will stick around, 41% are more inclined to think social media will overtake email and 15% just aren’t sure yet.  

Students that believe email will stay say it’s because email is good for business and formal communication. Many also pointed out that an email address is required for many sites, and that social media and email pair well together to cover informal and formal communications.

Those that said email will be replaced believe it’s because email is not fast enough, some even going as far as calling it  digital snail mail. This indicates that while many students use mobile devices to update their social media sites, they aren’t aware they can log in to their email account as well.  

Many of the students only took their current use of email into account when responding, which may be why they’re inclined to believe email will die or they’re uncertain about its future.  

What the future generation taught us 

Email marketing may not be dead, but it’s important to incorporate social media marketing in your plans as well. It’s also important to know your audience. We see that a lot of young people don’t use email as frequently,  and if that’s your target audience then you may need to beef up your social media presence.  

Even as these students get older and maybe do start using email more frequently, you also need to consider the fact that 72% of adults are on some social network.  

Here are the top 3 takeaway points from this study:

1. You can keep on emailing, the majority are still checking. 95% of teens who follow companies on Facebook also subscribe to their email. And what are most of them looking for? Coupons and deals. 

2. Students think email tends to be professional while social media tends to be more casual, but it’s not set in stone. You can make your emails more casual by including links to videos, comics, or anything that you find amusing that’s relevant to your industry. You can also announce more business related information on social media, such as sales or company news.

 

3. Social media is supposed to be fun, so don’t overdue the business stuff. Students made it clear they like spending time on social media because they enjoy it. You can keep yourself on their radar by interacting with them, but remember they are expecting most business communications in their email.

So we know this: email marketing is effective and here to stay awhile, and social media is popular among students and adults alike. The students pointed out they even work well together.  

This is what you should do to make this dream team work: 

Include time-sensitive information on social media. Most students mentioned they check their social media networks more often than email, so cover your bases and update your social media networks when you send that important email. 

Put up a sign up form on Facebook. With over 750 million users, and most students subscribing to lists they become fans on, you want to make it easy for potential subscribers to join. 

Start discussions on social media and carry them over to your emails. Ask for feedback and listen to what people are saying. You can learn what needs to be improved in your emails and also get some content ideas based on what people are talking about.  

Communication evolution: will one take over the other?

A good number of students alluded to a communication evolution, some with the opinion that email will be ousted and more with the opinion that email will continue to grow with the times and with them. It impressed us that so many of the students were able to think beyond their current social outlooks and see email’s place. Do you see email’s place?

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WANTED: Pinnable Status Updates On Facebook Pages

Outside of my second, more shadowy career as a Facebook and Twitter commentator-slash-gadfly, I also manage social media marketing campaigns for a wealth of international clients.

This past week I’ve been stretched to my absolute limit juggling tens of thousands of rabid excited fans who have been so keen to take advantage of a massively-hyped Facebook-promoted sale that they wiped out the website and completely trounced the server.

Followed by the other four servers that were added to better accommodate them.

The promotion was, of course, a victim of its own success. It’s not an exaggeration to say that things went completely crazy.

While the mania has calmed and tempers have been soothed, a lot of this could be avoided if Facebook pages came with one simple feature: pinnable status updates — an easy, one-click option allowing administrators to pin and freeze status updates at the very top of their page for an indefinite (but completely self-controlled) period of time, so that they could be seen by as many people as possible.

Here’s the thing. If you’re an administrator of a Facebook page you’ll know that status updates work much the same way as with any other Facebook profile. You post them up, fans like and comment, and life moves on. As new statuses are added, old ones scroll down the page and off the screen.

But a correctly-managed Facebook page isn’t just a broadcast tool. Fans also make posts directly to the wall. On any normal day this is absolutely fine and to be encouraged, because on any normal day it’s manageable.

When you’ve got tens of thousands of people making those wall posts every few minutes, it all very quickly goes awry. Some posts get missed (but to your fans it looks like they’ve been ignored), others scroll by so fast that conversations are never completed, and anything you try and post to the wall disappears off everybody’s screen before you can say, “if you could all just hold on a second…”

And then that drops off the page, too.

With a pinnable status update, this issue could easily be rectified. Let’s say for example you wanted to appease your fans and let them know that you were working on a solution to their problem – fixing the website, for example. If that was published and then pinned to the top of the Facebook page (via a convenient “pin this status” button), pretty much everybody would see it.

Anyone visiting the page to ask for help would see your post and, one would hope, be suitably appeased. Sure, it wouldn’t stop all requests for help, but it would certainly cut back on a vast number of them, certainly from those looking for a solution to the exact same problem. Everybody wins: Your fans get the information they want and you can go back to the business of providing first-class one-to-one support for those with different questions and concerns.

Because while it’s true that a page admin’s status updates go out to every fan’s news feed, that only really works if every fan happens to be online when you send them out. The average person likes lots and lots of things on Facebook, which means lots and lots of page status updates are quickly filling up their feed, and your message can and will get lost. On a fast-moving, popular Facebook page, for every fan that sees your announcement, thousands will miss it.

That’s the reality of social media marketing, and most of the time it’s something you just have to accept. But at the most important times it would be nice if we had a few extra tools to be able to provide superior customer service to fans.

The ideal pinned statuses could be unpinned at any time, and either replaced with something else (“The website is now working everyone — order away!”) or the page could simply resume it’s normal flow.

Bottom line?  It would be great if Facebook could make the page administrator’s job just that little bit easier, with  pinnable status updates. Heck, they could even have value for standard profiles, too.

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