Social Media Users Consume More Email

With social media becoming an increasingly important way for users to communicate and collaborate online, many believed that email, the aging communication service that has been around as long as the Internet, would finally see a decrease in use. In fact, that is exactly what the researchers at Nielsen set out to prove in a study. But the results were surprising as it turns out that social media users actually consume more email per month than before and than other users.

“We decided to churn some quick data to test our hypothesis that “Consumption of social media decreases email use.” First, we broke the online population into four groups. The first three are terciles of social media consumption in minutes. The fourth is a group that doesn’t use social media at all. We then looked at each segment’s time of web based email consumption over the course of a year. Finally, we subtracted the email consumption of those that do not use social media from those that do, basically to show a lift over possible external forces,” Jon Gibs, VP of media analytics at Nielsen, explained the methodology.

Nielsen admits that his approach was somewhat simplistic but believes that it was thorough enough for the scope of this study. The data showed that, contrary to popular belief and contrary to what the study set out to prove, the more social media users consume the more time they spend with email as well. In fact, high social media consumers use a lot more email going from 110 minutes a month in December 2008 to over 180 minutes in April 2009.

At the same time low or medium social media users spend less than 100 minutes per month with email. The numbers are hard to argue against and the study also provided a possible explanation for this phenomenon. Users that are highly engaged with social media sites tend to receive a lot more email in the form of user requests, event reminders, private messages and the likes while another possible outcome is that users extend their relationships from social media to other mediums like email.