Chances are you now have some “@facebook” email addresses on your email list. Have you looked yet? They’re there for sure, but in lower volume than you might think. Our analysis shows they represent just a tiny percentage of a typical B2C list, which is good since as an email application Facebook messages has a long way to go and poses several potential challenges for marketers.
Is it Email?
When launching this in Fall 2010, Mark Zuckerberg said it best himself: “Email is one way people are going to use this system, but we don’t even think it’s going to be the primary way.” He was right. It looks, acts and feels much more like text messaging. In fact, SMS/text seems to be what they had in mind more than email. One way this manifests itself is your most recent message shows up at the bottom of your previous one. Marketers will hate this since it is more difficult to create awareness and make a splash when you rely on the recipient to scroll to the bottom to see your most current message.
The Other Folder vs. Messages Folder
When you first sign up for Facebook Messages, they provide you with a friendly but explicit little pop-up that informs you “See messages from friends first. Bulk email and messages from unknown senders go to the Other folder.” Well, that certainly tells you who Facebook Messages is design for. (Hint: Marketers, it isn’t you.) This is true even for brands the user has “liked” on Facebook. There is a way for you to show up in the Messages folder, but it relies on the subscriber/recipient to take action. They need to go to the ‘Actions’ drop-down and click ‘move to messages.’ Is a recipient likely to do this unless you ask them to? No. So, the “Move to Messages” request could become similar to marketers’ requests for “add to address book” requests.
You might be saying, “hey this is like Gmail Priority Inbox and Smart Labels.” Yep. It is. And in both cases it is ultimately the recipient that chooses how your messages should be treated and where they should go. They are in control of your destiny.
Rendering (NOT)
Since Facebook seemed to be aiming for a messaging/SMS platform more than a state-of-the-art email platform, rendering HTML wasn’t on their shortlist. Your beautifully crafted HTML will look like garbage, with all of the tags visible, unless you optimize a text version and use multipart mime. The carnage doesn't end there. The user still has to click “expand” to see your HTML in its entire splendor. Will they? Not likely.
Meet them on their Turf.
Maybe we shouldn’t be looking at communicating with @facebook address owners at all via email. If a customer or potential customer of yours is so Facebook-centric that they are an early adopter of the @facebook address, they are perhaps more likely to engage with you on a Facebook wall post anyway.
CAN-SPAM
Well, even if this platform is currently more SMS than email, your emails to @facebook domains needs to be CAN-SPAM compliant with postal address, unsubscribe functionality, etc. Facebook themselves leveraged this CAN-SPAM to fight fraudulent Facebook pages. As Mediapost reported recently, “In an opinion issued this week, U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose, Calif. denied MaxBounty's motion to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of violating the spam law by creating allegedly fraudulent Facebook pages. The marketing company MaxBounty contended that such pages were not governed by the federal anti-spam law because that statute deals with "electronic messages." The company argued that electronic messages means mail to users' in-boxes.
But Fogel disagreed. "A determination that the communications at issue here are 'electronic messages' … is consistent with the intent of Congress to mitigate the number of misleading commercial communications that overburden infrastructure of the internet," he wrote.
In the end, fraudulent content is not welcome in email or any other messaging platform. Facebook Messaging will undoubtedly change over time, and become either more or less marketer friendly. However, at this point it is mostly a “not yet.”
Last 5 posts by Chip House
- The Four P’s of Marketing + One More for Deliverability - April 12th, 2012
- What binds Email, Facebook and Twitter users? All of them hate spam. - March 8th, 2011
- What binds Email, Facebook and Twitter users? All of them hate spam. - March 8th, 2011
- What Would You Tell your CEO? - July 1st, 2010
