Estimates show Twitter to have over 300 million users. Facebook is close to 1 billion and Google+ keeps growing every day.

Add to the mix all of the smaller, niche social networks and those numbers continue to climb.

Take into account that all of these platforms offer some type of messaging client you can see why some people can so confidently make the claim that email is dead.

But despite the popularity of instant messaging through social networks, text messages and Tweets, email remains a powerful force. Powerful enough that VisibleGains, a video marketing company, confidently makes the claim that email is here to stay in a recent infographic that they created.

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

So Facebook has 750,000,000 friends chatting back and forth over walls and instant messages to the tune of 60,000,000 every day, and Twitter boasts 300,000,000 users sending out communiqués via 140 character blurbs 140,000,000 times every day.

And as for email? Email can stake a claim of 2,900,000,000 accounts sending upwards of 188,000,000,000 messages every day. That’s right, there are three times more email accounts than there are Facebook accounts.

Numbers too big to wrap your head around? Let’s look at these figures on a more personal level:

• The average number of Twitter updates for each account is .47 a day
• Facebook accounts average .08 updates in a 24 hour period
• The average email user sends 64.8 messages per day.

So not only are there more email accounts, but the use of these accounts far outshines the use Twitter and Facebook. In reality, the comparative use numbers aren’t even close enough to present any meaningful threat at this point.

But the big social networks are growing at such a rapid pace that it won’t be too long before one of them passes up email as the primary means of online communication, right?

Not so fast. While no one can argue that using social media for communication is booming, email is still growing as well. In fact, the number of email messages sent in 2010 was up 19% from 2009.

And as for spam taking up a large percentage of email messages, that is something that should definitely be taken into account. Spam does skew the numbers a bit, but considering spam sent via email is at an all time low as scammers and online criminals focus more on deploying spam over the various social channels, this argument may just reinforce the claim that email use is more alive and well than ever before.

Moving Forward

According to their inforgraphic, VisibleGains makes the claim that by the year 2014 there will be 3.8 billion email accounts worldwide and close to half of them, 47%, will be located in Asia and the Pacific.

But when we talk about the future of email, those who will be using it in the future should be consulted shouldn’t they? After all, teens detest email right? To them text speak and Facebook pokes are much more meaningful methods of communication than a long, drawn out email. At least that is what some will have you believe.

Yet when teenagers were asked the question, “will email live on?” only 15% believe that email is dead. 41% didn’t know (or didn’t care) but 44% agreed that email will in fact live on.

Analyzing the Numbers

Even with so many different options for communication out there that are much easier to use, email remains supreme because it is viewed as a professional medium; and in the world of business, projecting a professional image still trumps ease of use.

Yet one aspect of business may be the one thing that moves social communication closer to emails numbers, and that is marketing.

As filters effectively separate junk marketing emails from the inbox the social platforms become more attractive to marketers. Spreading their messages over these networks has increased tremendously over the years and looks to continue to expand as search engine algorithms make social metrics more and more important to their results. Even still, email still has little to worry about.

Should We Say Goodbye To Email?

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Just a short while ago I wrote a post detailing the findings of a Pew Research Center study that shows email is still one of the most popular activities on the Internet.

Strangely enough, in the age of social media communication, those aged 19 to 29 reported using email more than any other age group - with 64 percent reporting that they use email at least one time per day.

However CIOs don’t quite see it this way according to another study.

In a poll of 1,400 CIOs completed by Robert Half Technology 54 percent believe that real time communication through instant messaging, SharePoint and tools like Yammer will become more popular with employees.

Specifically, 13 percent believed that these tools would be used much more than email and 41 percent see them as being used somewhat more than email in the near future.

Conflicting results

So if CIOs view real time communication as the tools that could dethrone email, then why is it email is still such a popular activity?

Quite simply, its popularity can be attributed to evidence that email is still an easier way for people to communicate.

Robert Half Technology stated three benefits to real time communication as reasons why many CIOs responded the way they did.

• Speed
• Convenience
• The social aspect

But are these benefits seen in the workplace?

Let’s look at speed for instance. The name alone, Instant Messaging, implies that communication between parties should be fast. But this only works if both parties are logged on at the same time. If you send a message to someone who is offline they still won’t see it until they sit down at their computer. Since most people have their Outlook or cloud based email open when they are at their computer so they too can see messages as soon as they arrive email conversations happen in real time quite frequently.

It just usually takes longer to write an email than it does to answer an IM. But if you are looking for details, what would you rather have?

Convenience also is a benefit that real time communication claims over email. But again, there is a struggle to see how multiple tools are more convenient than one communication standard.

After all, is it really more convenient to tweet, IM blast, comment on a social media page and post to a group? Or is sending an email to everyone who needs to be updated a much more practical solution?

In the end, an email can be sent to anyone using email no matter what service or client they use.

Real time communication isn’t as convenient. My coworker’s ICQ account may not work with my Google Chat account. And maybe my boss is using Facebook but I opt to use Google Plus. Of course, we can’t forget about Twitter now can we?

And then there is the social aspect. This point I find the most ironic.

Now logic would state that if most CIOs foresee real time communication tools becoming more important than email in the near future, you would assume that they approve of their use in the workplace.

The irony is because an overwhelming number of IT departments block access to social sharing sites citing lost productivity and sharing of confidential information as the reasons why.

Email can certainly be abused in the workplace, and you can definitely share company secrets via email so there is nothing out there to say that email is any more secure than social tools. But if these tools are to be so important to the way we communicate then why are so many employees in trouble for using them for legitimate business reasons?

But then again, is anyone really looking into SharePoint services for its social aspects?

Email is here to stay

To get a better grasp on a headline that reads IM, SharePoint tools will edge out email I would first ask what industries the CIOs polled work in. Of course younger companies and startups will often make greater use of collaboration tools that they are comfortable with Facebook messages and micro blogging posts. But in the greater scheme of things, these represent a small fraction of companies out there.

A more realistic view is that real time communication may start to become embraced in more traditional workplaces because it can make communication less formal; however it will be some time before anything takes the reign that email has held onto for so long.

Real Time Communication Tools or Email?

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It seems like everywhere you go the topic of Google+ vs. Facebook hits you smack in the face. No pun intended.

Much of this debate stems from the reliance of so many people using social tools as their primary method of communication and content curation.

This trend is so popular, in fact, that many people have predicted that social channels will replace email as the primary means of communication.

But before we all make a mad rush to dump our inboxes for Twitter, a new study from the Pew Research Center shows that email is still one of the most popular activities on the Internet.

A look at the numbers

In 2002, when Pew began their yearly study of Internet use, only 49 percent of all people used email daily. In 2011, that number has ballooned to 65 percent.

While it is easy to make the case that the number of people online has grown exponentially in the past nine years as well, that doesn’t easily explain why email use has grown so much.

After all, the methods of communication have grown at a far greater rate than the number of people online in the same time period.

Let’s look at 2002. At that time people communicated through email, chat, instant messaging and forums. There were early adopters of other technologies that we will look at in a minute but for the most part, the majority of communication was done over these mediums.

Now in 2011 there is still email, instant messaging and some forum use. Chat has slowed down to a crawl, but it has been replaced by text messaging, social networks, Twitter (and other micro blogging services) and blog commenting.

So with the pool of communication tools widened, why is it that email is still so popular? Scratch that, why is it that email use continues to grow?

A look at the landscape

Over the years, business communication has changed. Your co-workers are no longer down the hall or a cubicle away. Companies have offices all over the world. Remote workers, consultants and freelancers are often called upon to fill voids in the corporate structure to bring in additional support or save money.

Work is also outsourced on a much more frequent basis to people an ocean away from your headquarters.

While businesses have been quick to adopt the strategies mentioned above, they are still slow to consider social media as a viable business tool. The impressions that most decision makers have is that social tools are toys that high school and college aged kids use to wreck their future career opportunities. They are seen as another distraction; a way for employees to waste time and cut back on productivity.

To keep people on task, and prevent too much information from getting out, social communication tools are often banned in the workplace. So the employee is faced with two options.

1. Skirt the rules and bypass content filtering tools to use social media at work.
2. Use the tools that are in place for effective communication, email.

Another look at the statistics

It is commonly thought that the younger workforce goes with option 1 from above. Tech savvy enough to get around any blocks combined with a youthful arrogance often makes IT and management keep an eye out for any policy breaches.

Surprisingly, those aged 19 to 29 were at the top of the list when it came to daily email use. 64 percent reported using email once a day while 30 to 49 year olds came in at 63 percent.

Income also seemed to play a big role in how often you used email. Households that report income over $75,000 a year claim to access their email on a daily basis at 78 percent followed by 67 percent of people who make between $50,000 to $74,999 per year. Those making less than $30,000 per year have the lowest percentage of daily email use at 47 percent.

What do all these numbers mean?

As email administrators, our jobs are still valued.

But that also means that the responsibility of maintaining the availability of email communication across your organization is more important than ever, and as email use continues to rise so will the expectations placed on us.

Email is Still Most Popular

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Email not giving up its crown yet.

Email no longer rules, declared a headline in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal. Email has fallen from its throne as the king of wired communication, the author reasoned, because social media, like Facebook and Twitter, offer communicators a more immediate way to share their thoughts, situations and creative endeavors with others. However, while it’s true that email’s monopoly on communication is no more, that doesn’t mean it has relinquished its crown as the wallah of wired information exchange. In fact, social media, rather than snatching email’s diadem, have actually polished it.

Anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account knows how much “noise” those services generate. The compulsion by many users of those media to gush minutiae can be numbing. When email was the sole source of online communication, complaints abounded about information overload. That has only worsened with the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Email, though, as a mature technology, has developed ways to cope with noise. Filters sort messages as they arrive. Folders segregate items into bins where they can be logically acted on. Tags and categories further slice and dice clutter. Those things add value to email. By comparison, Twitter and Facebook can feel as if the postman drove a dump truck up to your house and jettisoned a year’s worth of mail on your lawn.

According to the WSJ writer, email is a quaint technology that reflects how people used to use the net. It’s made, she argued, for logging on, downloading and logging off. Social media, she continued, is more attuned to the “always on” connections people have today; this is a very peculiar contention. If anything, the spread of “always on” has been a boon for email. Checking email in bursts was never convenient. Now email programs can remain open from boot-up to shutdown and mail automatically gathered and delivered to an inbox. Moreover, many users are more likely to have their email application open all the time than to be camped at a social networking site. That’s why those sites offer the option of sending email notifications to their members when they receive a personal message or when a discussion they’re interested in is updated. Email quaint? Someone should let the folks at Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry and who continue to make silos of money on that quaint technology, in on that development.

One assertion by the WSJ scribe that’s hard to refute is that the pretenders to email’s lofty status are fun to use. That alone, though, is hardly threatening to email. Fun has entertainment value, but when what a communicator needs conveyed has more than entertainment value, it’s hard to beat email. What would you take more seriously: a 140-character text message written in gibberish or a 200-word email with all the T’s crossed and I’s dotted?

Why wait for email to be delivered when a correspondent can be contacted immediately through Instant Messaging?, asked the WSJ scribbler. That kind of thinking, though, assumes the correspondent wants to drop whatever he or she is doing to instantly respond to you. Instant Messaging can be a meddlesome application. Email, on the other hand, is less intrusive and less likely to irritate than IM. In addition, one has to wonder just how many instant messages require instant responses, or are just sent because a user is more concerned with speed than common sense.

No Wall Street Journal story would be complete without numbers, and this author has some to show email’s decline from favor. She noted that in August 2009, email users climbed 21 percent to 276.9 million users over August a year ago. During the same period, users on social networking and community sites jumped 31 percent to 301.5 million. Do raw numbers translate into increased value?  Most people use email every day for work. So it’s very likely that most of those 276.9 million users are actually using email. On the other hand, how many members of social networks even check out their sites every day? And if they do, how much time do they spend there? If one has an application open on the desktop and is using it all day long, does that application have more or less value than an application that’s used only occasionally? What’s more, a user will have one email program, but may belong to multiple social networks. So while that person counts as a single user of email, he or she could count as multiple users of social networks, thus skewing the growth numbers.

Email no longer rules? Not quite. The new generation of communication services have their place, but it’s mostly removing chaff that detracted from the value of email. Pithy messages that clogged email boxes can be relegated to text messages from mobile phones, a twit or a posting to a Facebook wall. For high value communication, for communication that’s important, email remains king.

Email still king despite pretenders

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