Today is the final part of our is social media future proof online poll series. So far we’ve collected some very interesting results, which we will write-up next week.
Back in March it was reported that social media networking is now more popular than email usage. With Google Wave coming later this year, we’re asking if social media networking will completely replace email by 2020?
Thanks for all of your votes this week and if you missed any of the questions they are all listed here. As always, please leave your comments here and tweet us at @seoptimise.
Kevin Gibbons is Founder/Director of Strategy at SEOptimise. Kevin is well known within the search industry as a blogger for sites such as Search Engine Land, Econsultancy and Search Engine Watch. Kevin is also a frequent SEO speaker at a number of conferences including Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Search Engine Strategies (SES), a4uexpo, SAScon and BrightonSEO.
This might very well happen, but the chances of social media looking the same as it does now are nil (whereas email’s been around for decades and isn’t likely to change much).
Email is dead already for a few years. Younger people don’t even bother unless they have to, they prefer IM etc.
Email “dead”? Not a chance. They said that about snail mail and as far as I see, snail mail still has its place. Businesses rely heavily on email to email docs, images, invoices, etc. No business is going to transfer their classified document on FB, LinkedIn, etc. And a lot of businesses still prefer face to face communication and phone use.
For personal use, maybe social media will be the primary method of transferring messages but this is a separate world that is very small compared to non-personal use. BTW, email started in the business world decades before it hit the personal world.
I think Google Wave & derivatives/impersonators will replace email gradually due to its superb functionality for project management and through the ways in which it will incorporate elements of IM and social networking through apps etc.
Nothing will kill email, however, we’ll just see the continuing divergence of communications channels, and a waning in the dominance of particular channels. I think we’ve already started to see this.