Facebook, The New Email?

Your professional networking, personal branding

, blog marketing, and article marketing may be the most valuable marketing you do over the next few years and these contacts will be more valuable than your email database for your e-commerce in the future.

The other day I was discussing with some colleagues doing a new promotional mailer via email to a couple of email lists. We have several lists. One list is a double opt-in, meaning the owner of the email not only asked to be added to our email list, but we sent a second confirmation to make sure they were real humans and they responded positively. This is a very valuable list. This is the kind of list we take very good care of and make sure we regularly provide valuable information and offers that are consistent with their interests.

The second list we have, also valuable, is a single opt-in list. At some point these folks asked to be added to our mailing list. We take great care with this list as well since we want to keep these folks interest in what we do. Then I posed the question, "will either of these lists be valuable in five years?"

According to a few recent statistics only 25% of emails are actually opened. 97% of all text messages are responded to within 15 minutes or less! Universities have stopped handing out email addresses to new students and now use Facebook and blogs to communicate.

Is the move to social media so compelling that email lists will be obsolete? Totally replaced by text and Facebook? Some naysayers in the office argued that you need an email address to set up a blog and Facebook. Although is true, I asked my kids how often they check their email. I have five children from ages 12 to 25. They all check their email about once a month. My oldest son checks once a week. I didn't have to ask how often they check their text. On average, kids from ages 12 to 18 send 3,000 text messages a month that's 100 a day! Also, my children were kind enough to let me be friends with them on Facebook. I see multiple conversations each day from all of my kids on Facebook. I know this is not a scientific study result, but I think the trend is clear.

I use all forms of social media, but personally, I prefer email. But then, I was an Internet pioneer and still get stuck on old ways of thinking. Building twitter followers, Facebook fans, LinkedIn connections, YouTube friends, Flickr friends may all be the most valuable "lists" you could build over the next five years for your business.

by: Bradley Hess

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