On Friday I had the opportunity to speak to a packed room of artists anxious to learn how leverage social media to increase attendance and reach new audience members.

At one point during the presentation we compared email with social media. One attendee was willing to use some of her numbers as an example.

Her Facebook Fan Page has a few hundred fans as well as her Twitter account. Her tweets are often retweeted by a few media Twitter accounts, therefore potential views of her updates grows exponentially each time it gets retweeted.

However, even with exponential growth, her reach via the social media channels that she has been nurturing is not even close to the reach of her email list of over 15,000.

So is that a knock out hit for email?

Many organizations have spent a lot of time and effort to grow and nurture their email list over many years. Of course email will have a greater reach than the Twitter account or Fan Page that was set up this year. Does this mean we should just stick with what we already have significantly invested in?

Consider that Social Media is rapidly becoming part of the everyday routine for the majority of the population.

Some recent statistics show:

• 3 out of 4 Americans use social technology

• Visiting social networking sites is the 4th most popular online activity –actually ahead of personal email

• Time spent on social networks is growing at 3x the overall Internet rate, accounting for 10% of all Internet time

• Estimated 100,000,000 videos are viewed on Youtube per day • 13,000,000 articles are available on Wikipedia

• 3,600,000,000 photos has been received on Flickr since June 2009, that’s 1 photo per every two citizens of this planet

• 5,000,000,000 minutes spent on Facebook each day

• Total amount of time spent on Facebook increased by 566% between December 2007-December 2008

• Facebook’s greatest growth in global audience numbers has come from people aged 35-49

• 93% of social media users believe that a company should have a presence in social media

• 85% of social media users believe that a company should interact with its customers in social media

Resources: Nielsen, Global Faces and Networked Places, 2009 Forrester, The Growth of Social Technology Adoption, 2008 DiggitalBuzzBlog.com Wikipedia.com

So does the above statistics and accelerated trends mean we just throw out our email list and start focusing on our social media efforts?

You do not need to look at your marketing efforts as an either/or situation. The reality is many people still want to receive email newletters. However many people are also opting out of email newsletters in favor of RSS feeds from their favorite blogs, or to keep up with their favorite brands and organizations through Facebook, or to get real time updates via Twitter or SMS.

We are at a time where your audience wants to be able to choose what information they get and how they get it and they expect to have those options.

As communicators, we not only can leverage social media channels to provide those options to our audience, but we can also leverage our social media channels to increase viral word of mouth marketing and to get better insights into what people are interested in and responding to.

Here are five steps that will help you evolve your email marketing list to the growing world of social media. 

1. Let your email audience know that special discount codes are available via Twitter or on your Facebook Fan page.
2. Highlight the hot topics on you social media sites on your email newsletters.
3. Virtually introduce your email subscribers to your most engaged community members.
4. Only provide an introduction to your stories via email. Provide a link to your blog were your audience can read and respond to the rest of the story.
5. Social Media is still new to most people. Provide tips and tricks to your email audience about how to use Facebook and Twitter. 

Have you seen or used other tips and tricks that blend email marketing with social media marketing? Please share.