High Social Media Use Also Means High Email Use, Nielsen Finds

At least in principle, as consumers and workers get access to unified communiations tools, there is a chance behavior will change. When a user can get a message in one media format and reply in another format, people might start using the tools they like best, and thereby decreasing use of other message formats.

Researchers at the Nielsen company, for example, guessed that as people began using social media, they would use less email, for example. To test that thesis, Nielsen broke the online population into four groups.

The first three are terciles of social media consumption in minutes, says Jon Gibs, VP, Media Analytics.  The fourth is a group that doesn’t use social media at all.

Nielsen then looked at each segment’s time of web based email consumption over the course of a year.
Finally, Nielsen 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.

As it turns out, Nielsen found the opposite of what it guessed it would find.

"It actually appears that social media use makes people consume email more, not less, as we had originally assumed, particularly for the highest social media users," says Gibs.

In part, that might be because social media sites like Facebook can be set to send messages to user inboxes every time someone comments on a post, depending on user preferences.

But it also is likely that high users of social media are, well, "social." They might use any number of media to keep in touch with friends and associates.