Topic:
eMarketer published an article last week saying that More time was spent on Social Media than Email Worldwide. The fact backing this assertion was that "The TNS “Digital Life” survey of internet users around the world found in September 2010 that on average, surfers spent 4.6 hours a week on social sites, compared with 4.4 hours on email, the most common internet activity."
While being an interesting trend indication we should bear in mind a few other important facts:
- The same study indicates that 72% of worldwide Internet users check their emails everyday against only 46% checking their social media profiles everyday.
- Social media is all about being...social, which means spending time to create and share an experience with your friends or brands you like. If you are familiar with Forrester's Social Technographics Ladder, you should know that social media behaviors fall into different categories depending on the level of engagement and almost all of those activities whether it be publishing a blog or watching a video are highly time consuming.
- Email is seen as a communication tool to most users and therefore ISPs such as Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail are constantly developing filtering features (e.g. avoiding spam and sorting your most important messages) to improve their users' experience. Email's core objective is to enable you to convey an information in an efficient and productive way, to make it short I think you mostly use emails to get things done, not to browse about and chat with your friends (even if such features are sometimes available).
- Time spent is not always a good marketing indicator. Let's take the example of search marketing. A good search engine is an engine that provides results instantly so that you don't spend your time searching for things that you should be reading, watching or listening to. Users don't and should not spend a huge amount of time searching online however this does not mean that search is dead or is less powerful than social media especially when search accounted for 47% of US online ad dollars during the first half of 2010.
To sum it up, there is no point in making a big deal of users spending more time on social media sites than email...this is just a very normal result since users don't use email and social media sites for the same purpose.
Sebastien Levaillant
Product Manager, Social Media