Facebook email - what's the impact for education marketing?

The biggest digital  announcement last week was around Facebook's move into the world of email. The system is actually only in beta at the moment, so it's unclear what the full product offering will be, however Facebook has stated the following features will be included:

• Facebook users will be able to access a range of messaging formats in one place. The vision is that SMS and instant messages and email will all be accessible
• Facebook Messages will have a very high spam filter, creating what Facebook calls a "social inbox". You can set your privacy settings so your inbox treats messages from people who aren't your friends on Facebook as spam. Alternatively, all your non facebook friend emails will go into a folder called "Other".
• Messages will be more concise. Subject lines and CC and BC features will be stripped out in the new system.

But are these changes going to help or hinder commercial email marketing activity? In some ways this new system could actually make email marketing harder than it was previously. For example, it is unclear whether Facebook Messages will allow the delivery of HTML email formats, meaning that marketeers might need to create text only emails for people with @facebook.com email addresses. Also it is unclear how updates sent to people who "like" your Facebook page are going to be handled. Will these end up in the "Other" folder too?

Also, more broadly what impact could this enhancement have on how educational institutions communicate with students generally? Some universities have already abandoned providing email addresses to their students already, and I propose that Facebook's move is likely to make a university email addresses even less essential.

Looking at the positives however, Facebook email should offer the opportunity to target prospective students further based on the content of their emails combined with social graph information. This should make online display advertising utilised on Facebook more targeted, improving effectiveness generally.

At this point however, we can only speculate on the impact of the new messaging platform. One thing is clear however, as Facebook's largest audience is 18-24 year olds the platform is only going to grow as a marketing resource for education marketeers.


To find out more see Facebook's video on their new messages system.