From Marketing Sherpa:

Is _______ going to kill email?

.

It‘s a question we love to ask every few years when some new technology comes along.

RSS sparked the last wave of discussions, and of course, now it‘s social.

.

Will social media affect email? Definitely. Will it kill the medium?
Far from it.

.

After all, email is the original opt-in tactic, while social and mobile are newcomers, and email works in tandem with most other tactics to increase engagement, deliver relevant content and build contact databases.

.

My question is: do your Social Media efforts work with an established email program?

.

Aweber helps users integrate by auto posting notices of email blasts to a chosen Twitter, but it requires several clicks for the Tweet reader to get to the email content. And, there’s practically no way to add the FaceBook tag (#FB) to the Tweet.

.

I prefer to go the other way: FaceBook to Twitter, so that means a manual post to FB and a link directly to the content which, to get into the Tweet needs to be a shortened URL.

.

Whatever works for you, you need to implement a strategy. I see significant percentages of traffic coming forom the SM sites and reports from other top marketers that Twitter and FaceBook are their top lead generating sources.

.

Don’t think that just because you’re local and your customers/clients visit you physically that Social Media isn’t important to your long term business health. It’s only going to get more critical. Hire someone to help you or learn to do it yourself but it must be done!

.