Facebook Messages is rumored to be an email-killer and set to challenge Google Mail for market share. But will it? See the video below for Facebook’s promotion of the social network’s latest service enhancement.
Although it’s too early to be sure exactly how this might change the game, businesses need to start thinking about the potential impact Facebook Messenger may have based on what we know of the service already. With over 500 million active Facebook users it is bound to have some sort of effect.
It’s also likely to take time for people to understand how they want to use the service and so the impact is likely to change over time.
From the Facebook Video we know that the service is going to favour communications from a user’s friends and those people, or organisations trusted by the user. The social inbox takes anti-spam a step further than the current inbox/junk folder arrangement of traditional email accounts by only allowing messages from friends by default, any messages from anywhere else will be bounced. Businesses will have to up their game and become more personal in their marketing approach if they hope to appear in a users social inbox. This will be hugely important if the social inbox becomes the primary communication hub for a critical mass of Facebook users.
The social inbox takes the approach of sorting conversations by sender rather than by subject line. This puts the emphasis very much on conversations – personalised, two-way dialogue. How does this fit into your marketing plans?
Holding personal conversations with individuals rather than using mass marketing techniques will become ever more important. How are you going to facilitate this? Is your company open to empowering staff to engage with your audience making every employee a potential member of your customer service team? Are you prepared to take the time to develop real conversations with your customers?
Due the nature of Facebook I’d imagine people will be far more protective with their Facebook.com email address than they are with their gmail or hotmail accounts. They don’t accept just any old Jo wanting to be their ‘friend’ so why would they give out their Facebook email address to just any business or website either. So what are you going to do to get into their circle of trust? How are you going to stand out as a business they really want to connect with?
I only started this post as an introduction to the new service but it has really got me thinking and has thrown up far more questions than answers. The answers will be different for each and every company and will depend very much on how the take up of the service goes, how users interact with it and how Facebook changes the service over time, as I’m sure they will do. What I am sure about is that businesses will have to get more personal in their communications and get better at measuring their marketing activities.
Google have already tried to go down this route with Buzz but I’d say the Facebook platform and userbase gives it a much better chance of success. These two companies won’t be the last to embrace more personal channels of communication either and businesses are going to have to get on-board and embrace what is an ever progressing, ever changing social marketplace.
So for me, the changes predicted by the development and launch of Facebook Messages only goes to remind businesses they they need to:
- Get involved with social media with a strategic, integrated and planned approach
- Get personal and start dealing with customers on an individual basis
- Add value to your audience whether it is online or offline
