Bubblegumkitten

Will share to social replace forward to a friend in email marketing?

I read a post on Email Responsibly which details figures from a series of email tests to see which links people used when presented with a range of options to share their email with others.

The question posed is an interesting concept, I must admit that I hadn’t until now considered the idea that share to social might ever fully replace forward to a friend in email marketing.

Social networking offers users a place where they can share links and comments with a much wider audience with a single click – and I can see how that would be appealing to both the sender and he recipient. The uptake on social networks is also still growing so it looks likely that this trend is only likely to increase in the near future.

I think in the B2C market there is a high probability that share to social will begin to completely replace forward to a friend, although I think they will always co-exist to give the user the choice – and also to cater for emails which by nature people would only want to share with one or two people and would not want to publicise on their Facebook wall or similar.

For the B2B market I suspect that forward to a friend will remain predominant – as businesses often have one persona on a social network and not one per employee. Sure employees are likely to use social networks, but often they want a separation between their work and employed life. People do often have work twitter accounts though, and if tweeting continues to gain popularity I can see this being something which might potentially tip the B2B scales away from forward to a friend… I am not sure, as it is hard to tell is Twitter for employees will continue to rise, or if there will be a backlash against it in the future when someone posts confidential company info and subsequently has their twitter account hacked… it is a bit of a guessing game to see how that particular usage of the network will progress long term.

You can read the original blog post with it’s stats and figures based on their tests by click the link below:
http://www.emailresponsibly.com/2009/09/15/is-share-with-your-network-killing-forward-to-a-friend/