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In today’s age of social media, many tend to scoff at the use of email. And while it could be true that you wouldn’t communicate with friends through an email hosting platform, this changes when the relationship is professional. In fact, according to the "Shape of Email" study conducted by Loudhouse on behalf of cloud-based e-mail management specialist Mimecast, businesses still greatly value e-mail as a means of professional communication as well as see the importance of reliable email hosting.

More than three-quarters of e-mail users who were included in the study revealed that social media has not reduced their reliance on e-mail when it comes to dealing with customers or colleagues. E-mail is still preferred over social media for all forms of workplace collaboration, including documentation exchange (preferred by 91 percent of respondents), arranging a meeting (89 percent), requesting information (88 percent), and sharing views and opinions (72 percent).

As stated by Mimecast CEO and co-founder Peter Bauer, “The research shows that the way the average employee uses e-mail at work has changed. For many people, e-mail is no longer just a messaging system. It has become the primary tool for storing, sharing and searching for information. This is why we are seeing information workers increasingly becoming inbox workers; they rely on e-mail for all aspects of their job and spend, on average, 50 percent of their working day using e-mail."

I agree with Bauer on this note. As a college freshman, e-mail has been the primary form of communication with professors, faculty, and student organizations. And while the option of Facebook (News - Alert) and other social networks is there, e-mail feels more professional and is easier to archive conversations. These reasons may also parallel to business professionals’ decision to use email over social networks.

"What is clear is that, despite the huge number of specialist collaboration and social tools that have come to market in recent years, e-mail remains the first choice for the majority of business users," Bauer continued. "While e-mail is not perfect, it seems that information workers are reluctant to adopt other, more social, tools if it means they have to leave their inbox behind. Therefore, rather than trying to entice users away from e-mail and on to other platforms, IT teams should look for ways to make their e-mail more efficient by introducing new, inbox-friendly collaboration tools and making the data stored within the archive more accessible."

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