So you’ve collected your customers’ emails. Great work!
But think about the limits of email.
Email is a 40 year old platform. Many organizations (and some large corporations) are doing away with email. In its place, they’re using instant messaging and social media messaging platforms.
Wonder why?
Well, for the answer, let’s look at why social media, as a platform, is so much more valuable than traditional email:
- Two-directional:
- Social media allows for rich, two-way communication. Email provides that, but social media allows for this discussion to take place within a full-featured ecosystem. Participants can see everything about the other parties. This includes their likes, dislikes, relationship status, and more. This information contributes to a better form of communication.
- Multi-media:
- Social media platforms allow for users to share text, links, photos, and videos. These multimedia files are shared with individuals, groups, communities, clubs, and other collections of users pulled together within. It’s a more flexible sharing system.
- Permanence:
- Emails change often. As people change jobs, Internet providers, etc, it is not uncommon for many people to have up to 10 emails! Social media allows a person to have one distinct URL that is personalized to that person, and permanent.
- Affiliation:
- One of the most important things that social media allows (that email groups cannot) is the ability for users to affiliate with a brand with user-controlled data sharing. That brand-consumer relationship can be as public, or as private, as the user would like it to be.
- Viral:
- This is the big payoff. If your company posts an interesting piece of content, your followers can ‘like’, ‘comment’, or ‘share’ that content which will be visible to their entire network. Because of this, your brand name can get exposure to thousands (or even millions) of people who are not directly connected to you. The more engaging and interesting the content, the better a chance that your content will ‘go viral’. Want to post viral content? Take a look at one example of a form of viral content here.
Emails are still important for delivering your newsletters and traditional emails; also for inviting people to join your social media community. The great news for TSS clients is that we will help you recruit your followers using email platforms, and will coach you through proper use of social media and traditional email messaging platforms going forward.
We are here to help you grow! Contact us to learn more.
