When you wake up in the morning, what is the first tech thing you do? Check your phone for text messages or missed calls? Check your email inbox? Check your twitter messages? Or do you check your Facebook updates?
Social media has definitely change the way we do things and the way we keep updated with what’s happening to our friends, love ones and even the world. The magic of social media is the word “share”. People love to share – they share their photos, videos, news, opinions and people love to read them all.
Now, why do I even bother to ask the question “Is Facebook the new email? Because just this year, Facebook modified user profiles to replace their email address with @facebook.com address. So the effect is everytime someone sends you a message via your @facebook.com address, it will become a Facebook message to the user.
While it’s convinient to send message using Facebook considering that most of your friends, both personal and professional are on Facebook, one of the issues about sending messages in Facebook is privacy. How secure is it really to send messages in Facebook? Remember, this is a business message and not just a simple social message. That is why most of the people I talk to still uses email to communicate with their business counterparts.
Another disadvantage to my opinion in using Facebook message is the thin line that separates business and personal. Sometimes a user may not observe the proper etiquette in sending business messages due to the very nature of social media. There’s a big difference between a professional or business message compared to a friendly message. Users should be able to or should I say watch out for their friendly behavior while using social media for business purposes.
So I think Facebook message and emaill will still co-exist. Facebook will not replace email, that would be a long shot. I do use Facebook to send some business messages but I limit it to inquiries and confirmation of certain meetings. But if I will be sending proposals, it is still email for me.
(Article written by Jerry Liao)
