Despite Having 300 Million Members, Facebook is Not The Largest Social Network
In my opinion, online social networks have three distinguishing features: 1) They have profiles that enable people to express their identity 2) Ability for people to connect to these profiles 3) To be successful, there’s a greater value created by a group of people sharing than as individuals who do not.
This week, Facebook announced it has ballooned to 300 million users, far more than MySpace and certainly Twitter. Yet, I want to assert that Facebook isn’t the largest social network, email is (we’ve talked about this before). Recent numbers from Microsoft showed that the number of active users (although the definition of ‘active’ isn’t explained) exceeds 375 million users for Hotmail.
When you combine all of the email networks from Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, and the millions in Outlook at corporations all over the world –it dominates over Facebook.
Not Everyone Agrees Email and Social Networks Are The Same
I took the conversation to my own community in Twitter, and while the majority seemed to agree others respectfully suggested that “email is not a social network because:” 1) It’s private, not public, 2) Lack of profiles, and 3) Lack of discoverability of people. I’d like to quickly address why I stand by that email is the largest social network:
Social networks can be private. Just like in real life, some communities are not for the public. In fact, Facebook is a closed social network, very little of your personal information can be seen by the public. Secondly, some of the most successful social networks are deployed inside of companies, just ask folks like Telligent, Mzinga, Awareness, and Jive.
Email does indeed have profiles. Many argued that email doesn’t have a profile, yet, consumer email clients all offer profiles. For example, see Yahoo’s, Microsoft Live, (which can spur from a hotmail account) and the Google profile. We’re encouraged to put our handle, name, location, and other demographic information. The second place to look is within the signature of each email you receive, people put their name, company, title, contact information and whatever else they want to self-express. In both cases people opt-in to put that information in, and make their profile information accessible to those they want to share it with.
Email profiles are discoverable and social. Some who don’t believe email is a social network will argue that the profiles are not easy to find. A social networks will help like-minded users find each other, and some social networks even recommend others to follow. Take another look corporations that have deployed exchange server have a large directory with individual names, profiles, and groups that they belong to. You can search for titles, locations, and groups to find who in a company may have similar needs to you. What about in the consumer space? Yahoo encourages it’s mail users to ask and answer questions from each other –even if you don’t know them directly. In fact, in my Yahoo profile, there’s an area that suggests people I should connect with, one which is Shel Israel, who is certainly a friend, and Microsoft Live recommends people “like you” to connect with.
Agree or Disagree, Email and Social Networks Intertwine
A few more indicators that email and social networks are starting to merge: For public social networks like Facebook, Glassdoor, Yelp, and Twitter, email is a pre-requistite to register. Messages that you receive in Facebook or Twitter, often end up in your email stream. Email portals are already developing social features around them, have you seen the Yahoo homepage? It’s starting to look like a social network.
Recommendations: Approach Email and Social Tech in an Integrated Strategy
It’s too easy to focus on the shiny microblogging tools and cast incumbent technologies by the side. Savvy communicators should factor in how email and social networks fuel each other, they should:
- Interlace email and social efforts. In your marketing efforts, make it easy for people to share content both on social sites and through email. Use the sharethis feature on your websites encouraging people to post content on social networks –or email to each other. In your email marketing, make it easy for people to also share the information on their social networking profiles.
- Prepare for applications to be build on email platforms. Recognize that email portals are becoming social platforms, and brands will soon build or sponsor applications that interact with Yahoo Mail, Microsoft Live, and whatever comes next.
- Focus on the relationships between individuals –less on the medium. The medium isn’t as important as the relationships between the people. When Twitter goes down, some shift to Friendfeed, or Facebook to communicate, people have a way to find each other regardless of the medium or channel.
I hope this triggers an interesting discussion, even if you don’t agree. Would love to hear a global perspective on mobile usage, how does that factor in?
Update: On a related note,this study indicates that email usage is being eroded away by social networking sites and instant messaging. This is the type of data that will send email providers scurrying to the product roadmap to quickly integrate into the social web as quickly as possible.
Google Wave is going to revolutionize email and thus the social network
I stopped reading after the “math” behind the metric of active users of Hotmail was not explored. That number is pure horsehockey, hence obviating the premise of this article. Sorry man I don’t buy it.
A very good note that triggers some thought and discussion. I especially liked your approach where you moved away from labels and definitions and look at functions.
I suspect I am older than the rest of this posting audience; through my clients and experience, people over 35 communicate with FB et. al very much like they do with email…its just that social networks makes it easier and is more compelling.
As they slowly embrace twitter, they same will hold.
Social media is fun; email is pure workhorse. Both accomplish many of the same functions and have considerable overlap. Roll on the future!
Nicely done.
Interesting comments so far. I think it is easy to get caught up in the electronic social network thing and forget all the others. Telephones, face to face anyone? Of course email is a social network, it is just a bit more clunky in some respects when compared with others and as other comments infer (eg privacy laws) commercially a bit limiting. The point, in my opinion, is to keep an eye out on all forms of social network as a portfolio of options for marketeers.
Yes, I think email is a social network. Of course, this entire discussion depends on how each individual defines the term “social network,” which to me is a web-based way to connect *people* to other *people* based on all the various relationships they have. It doesn’t matter whether it happens in private or for the whole world to see. I can have a private aspect on FB or Twitter, if I choose, and it is no less social. And while a one-to-many relationship may be MORE social…a one-to-one relationship is still social.
Some tools for cultivating this communication have aspects that make for a broader, more interesting and appealing experience.
…my 2 cents….
Is this really a meaningful question?
The whole idea of communications is evolving at an increasingly rapid pace with the advent of social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and all their respective derivatives and ecosystems. Us old guys remember the original ‘killer app’ for the internet was email. We used to live, eat, sleep and breathe in email. Social networks are a natural evolution of the communications and collaboration process and will likely replace email as the preferred means of enterprise communications…over time of course. I find I use the newer tools much more frequently on a personal basis and rely less and less on email. However, in the business world email still rules.
Interesting post. My own view is that, while e-mail is a social networking tool, there is a distinction between it and a social network in that the social network embodies and facilitates a structure of relationships between people that e-mail does not manage. If we call e-mail a social network we abandon a quite useful distinction.
Social networks are higher up the stack than e-mail and, as you say, many of them use e-mail as a communications medium. Compare this to the seven layer OSI communications model and e-mail is down at the network level while social networks are up in the applications layer.
At the same time, I think you are spot-on in saying that e-mail and social networks are converging and that they need to be managed in a coherent way. Google Wave shows at least some elements of what the future looks like. What is needed is a conceptual model that recognises the different degrees of abstraction and structure in the social and communication environment.
At the lowest level, we have communications media – e-mail, blog posts, wall-writing, twitter messages etc. At the highest level we have the real interpersonal relationships that they implement – friend, family member, priest/parishioner, spammer/spammee and so on.
In between we have some tools for managing the relationship space – directories, Facebook, etc.
What do you think?
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