Email is Still King of the Internet

A new report out from Pew Internet says that based on a survey from May, search and email are the top two activities online adults engage in on the web. The number is 92% for both. 59% use dsearch on a typical day. 61% use email on an average day, however.

“Since the Pew Internet Project began measuring adults’ online activities in the last decade, these two behaviors have consistently ranked as the most popular,” says Kristen Purcell for Pew Internet. “Even as early as 2002, more than eight in ten online adults were using search engines, and more than nine in ten online adults were emailing.”

“Email and search form the core of online communication and online information gathering, respectively,” says Purcell. “And they have done so for nearly a decade, even as new platforms, broadband and mobile devices continue to reshape the way Americans use the internet and web. Perhaps the most significant change over that time is that both activities have become more habitual. Today, roughly six in ten online adults engage in each of these activities on a typical day; in 2002, 49% of online adults used email each day, while just 29% used a search engine daily. ”

One very interesting aspect of Pew’s email data is that the people using email most are the youngest demographic surveyed (18-29). This is all the more interesting, considering claims once made by Facebook that email is “probably going away” because of younger generations gravitating more towards texting and social media. Of course that was before Facebook itself began offering email addresses.

“Email is similar to search (and many other online activities) in that the youngest online adults, the college-educated, and those in the highest income categories are more likely than others to engage in the activity,” says Purcell. “These demographic differences are considerably more pronounced when one looks at email use on a typical day. Moreover, while overall email use is comparable across white, African-American and Hispanic online adults, internet use on any given day is not. White online adults are significantly more likely than both African-American and Hispanic online adults to be email users on a typical day (63% v. 48% v. 53%, respectively).”

Social media is certainly growing as an online activity, though that growth has slowed tremendously over the last couple years, as you can see from the top graph. It’s still below buying products online, getting news online, and of course search and email.

However, the lines are getting blurrier among some of these things. People are, for example, getting more of their news through social network sites. Facebook is combining email and social media messaging into one “social inbox”.

It will also be interesting to see the impact Google+ has on Internet culture. While still in its very early days, it has been growing rather quickly, and the more people that use it, the more people will have access to Gmail, by simply having a Google account. How much they use it in relation to Google+ circles and streams remains to be seen.

For now, however, it looks like email is still king of the hill when it comes to online communication. That says a lot about the value of effective email marketing.

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Dentists: Is Your Dental Marketing Plan Ready for Google Plus?

Google+ is in limited field trial and being tested with a small number of users, but it won’t be long before the Google+ project is the next big trend in dental marketing.

You might be thinking it’s just another Facebook.

Google hopes to convince you otherwise.

Google+ intends to set itself apart from Facebook by limiting the type of sharing that happens in Google+ to small groups — like a local photography group, your immediate family or the people you work with directly — instead of how it is on Facebook where what you share is shared with friends, friends-of-friends and the Internet at large.

Google+ users can be selective with how they share information within their social circles.

Rumor has it that once Google+ has worked out their beta launch tweaks for the user-side of Google+, they’ll be introducing brand pages for businesses. Google is promising that the business pages are going to be worth the wait because they will be integrated with both AdWords and Analytics.

Here’s a video Christian Oestlien, one of Google’s product managers created to help explain what’s going on with business identities on Google+:

Some dental practices may want to rush getting on Google+ by setting up a business profile as a personal profile on the user side of Google+. Don’t be tempted to do this. Google has warned that they will be deleting businesses who set themselves up in personal profiles.

Google already terminated the Google+ accounts of Mashable, Ford and Search Engine Land who attempted to create a business presence on Google+.

It’s not a smart dental marketing plan to risk getting banned by Google.

Instead of tempting your online fate with the Gods of Google by trying to launch a business presence, instead begin to prepare for the coming launch of Google+ business pages by making sure you, your employees and your favorite patients are signed up for user profiles as Google+ expands.

You might even consider holding a contest to see who the first dental patient is who receives a Google+ profile and invites you to join their circle.

The point would be to get on to Google+ as a person and begin building your circles so that when you launch your Google+ business page you can ask those in your circle to promote you to their circles and so on, and so on.

What are you thoughts on Google+?  Are you planning to use it?

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