What You Need to Know About Facebook’s New Messaging Platform

In introducing Facebook’s integrated messaging platform on Nov. 15, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a point of repeating that the new feature was not an email service. Nor was it “an email killer,” he said. So what is Facebook’s new offering, and what effect will it have on marketers?

Introducing… what?
In a presentation streamed live online, Zuckerberg described the offering, which so far lacks a catchy name, as a “modern messaging system.” The primary goal is to enable users to communicate in a channel-agnostic manner: Rather than sending a friend an email and a text message and an IM to make sure he receives your message, the new platform will allow you to simply type your message and with one click have it disseminated to all the applicable channels.

Zuckerberg said outlined three main aspects of the platform:

·  seamless messaging—“It’s not email,” he repeated. “It handles email” as well as IM, SMS, and other modes.

·  conversation history—all communications with a person will be accessible in one spot, regardless of the message’s original channel.

·  social inbox—like Gmail’s recently launched Priority Inbox feature, the Facebook platform enables users to prioritize messages into one of three folders. Facebook friends will be sorted by default into the premier folder, though users will be able to move messages into and out the various folders at will. 

Among other features, the platform will give users the option of having a Facebook email address based on their user name (e.g., Joe.Bloggs@Facebook.com), and it will support file attachments and allow for easy forwarding of messages. Although the platform does not yet support other email systems—you cannot include messages you receive from a friend via Gmail or AOL into your conversation history with that friend the way you can text messages and IMs—Zuckerberg said he hopes to incorporate this functionality in the future.

Facebook has already starting rolling out the system, albeit only via invitation so far. It expects the rollout to occur over several months.

Not quite revolutionary
In the days prior to the announcement, many were convinced that Facebook was going to declare its entry into the email sector as a full-fledged service provider. But “I would have been surprised if what they had announced was just an email messaging platform,” says Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations for Silverpop. Regarding the need for users to be able to receive messages without having to consult multiple platforms and systems, “we’ve all known that this is where email needs to go,” he says. “Somebody had to make a major move in that direction.”

One could argue that somebody already had: Google, with its Wave platform, which it released last year, to less than universal acclaim. If you’d forgotten about Wave, you’re not alone. 

Elie Ashery, president of Gold Lasso, thinks that Facebook’s platform will succeed where Wave failed for several reasons. Whereas Google relied on proprietary protocols, Facebook is using universal protocols, which should make integration that much easier. And Facebook, as the world’s number-one social network, already has a user base of 550 million people, whereas Google didn’t have a social network behind it at all. Then, too, last year consumers might not have been fed up enough with juggling multiple channels and media to embrace the opportunity to unify all their messages on one platform. 

“I don’t think Facebook has done anything revolutionary here,” Ashery says. “But I think that they’re at a better time than Google was.”

In fact, most of those who listened to Zuckerberg's presentation seem to expect Facebook’s new platform to catch on. Zuckerberg noted that he does not expect a majority of Facebook users to immediately sign up for Facebook email addresses and shut down their existing email accounts—nor does anyone else. But Dennis Dayman, chief privacy and deliverability officer for Eloqua, says that although “Facebook has had a couple flubs around privacy,” younger users in particular will likely be happy to adopt a Facebook email account. 

As a result, “the other platforms are going to have to do a better job of keeping people using their platform,” Dayman says. This no doubt explains AOL’s preemptive strike of announcing the beta version of its improved email product, Project Phoenix, the day before Facebook’s announcement.

What you should focus on now
While Dayman says that the new Facebook platform isn’t a cause for immediate concern for marketers, he adds that you should expect to see some churn of email addresses among your subscribers.
 
McDonald agrees. “All of this flurry of activity,” he says, referring to AOL’s Project Phoenix as well as the Facebook platform, “is only going to hasten people changing their email address. If you don’t make it easy for somebody to change their address with you, they have to unsubscribe, and you run the risk of their not resubscribing. And even if they do resubscribe, you lose your history with them.”

For that reason, McDonald says, it’s critical that your email preference center includes an address-change option and that you link to it prominently within all your outbound email and (of course) on your Facebook page.

What’s more, Dayman says, because of the new platform’s emphasis on mix-and-match channels, “marketers need to ensure that their preference centers give more options as to how users want to be reached—not just email but also SMS, Twitter, etc.”

Among the myriad issues not addressed during the Facebook announcement was whether messages from companies who were “liked” by users would default to the priority folder of their inboxes. Zuckerberg said he expected users to check that priority folder at least once a day, compared with several times a week for the other folders. If that’s the case, and if companies’ messages to their fans do get preferential treatment in the inbox, “the ‘like’ button will become a universal opt-in,” says Ashery, “not just for email but also for SMS” and other media.

That’s why, Ashery says, “I would concentrate on getting as many people to ‘like’ you on Facebook as possible in your target market. I would focus all my efforts on the list-building side.” And if you don’t yet have a Facebook page for your business, launching one and using it as a prospecting and retention tool should probably become a priority, particularly for b-to-c organizations.

Indeed, the need to integrate email and social media has been a hot topic among marketers during the past year, and the best ways to do so a topic of both debate and concern. Facebook’s new platform reiterates the importance of that integration.
 
And despite the pronouncement earlier this year by Facebook’s chief operating officer that social media would all but kill email as a channel, the universal messaging platform “speaks to the email industry’s longevity and importance,” Ashery says, simply by the inclusion of email in the platform. Facebook, according to Ashery and McDonald, is looking to expand into bona fide ecommerce, “and you can’t have legitimate commerce without email,” says Ashery.

Perhaps most important, though, is that the widespread adoption of unified messaging platforms like Facebook’s will mean that the medium is no longer the message. “Gone will be the day—not in the near future but not in the too-distance future—of creating different messages for different media,” Ashery contends. “Simplicity will come back into the game. Marketers will have to be more obsessed with personalization than with the channel”—a message that email pros and social marketing mavens alike have been trying to spread for some time.