Last year, Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to Facebook’s messaging platform. Now you can integrate your email, text messages and chat messages into one platform—Facebook. If you would like an @facebook.com email address, you can get that as well.

Putting it another way, “The platform has three components: seamless messaging, conversation history and social inbox. Conversation history places all one-to-one communications in a single strand, including chat, email or SMS,” reports DM News.

Email too Slow

Example of what messages now look like on your phone.

Zuckerberg thinks that email is too slow and the future is going to lead to faster messaging. “We don’t think the modern messaging system will be email.” He noted that the “‘next-generation’ messaging will be seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short, but not email,” reports CNTV.

Through Facebook’s email, you’ll also be able to filter your messages from friends and others. According to Facebook’s blog, “It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. It’s not that those other messages aren’t important, but one of them is more meaningful. With new messages, your inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into another folder where you can look at them separately. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.”

All-in-One Messaging

According to Inside Facebook, “The best part about new messages is how it brings chat into threaded, searchable conversation history. If someone sends you a message when you’re online, you’ll see it as a chat. If you send them back a chat and they’ve already logged off, it’ll be routed to their new messages inbox, and shown in the same thread as your previous chat. This means you don’t have to worry about conversations breaking down because one person changed the interface through which they were communicating.”

If you use Gmail, you may be thinking a lot of these new features seem very familiar. Priority Inbox filters important messages so you see them first, and if you use Gchat and go offline, you’re able to get the missed message in your inbox.

This has many people thinking, “Is Facebook the Gmail killer?” It’s too soon to tell, but Augie Ray, an online marketer, believes “it’s about facilitating and enhancing your personal relationships. Facebook wants to be the platform for personal communications and leave the boring stuff to Gmail and others.”

Groups

In the revamped Facebook’s Group features, you can now send one message to a group of friends that you choose. To do this, simply go to the Create a Group button on the left side of your home page.

This box appears once you hit the button.

From here you can select the friends you wish to invite and name the group. This way you can stay up to date on everything with your friends, colleagues and business partners. Facebook Groups used to be less integrated and more novelty, but now people can make groups based simply around a grouping of their friends to share information on a private platform.

Why This Is Important

Groups, when combined with Facebook email, could be a game-changer for email marketers in 2011. Instead of sending traditional email blasts, you can send creative messages via Facebook that are more likely to resonate with recipients. It’ll serve as a new and unique platform for receiving marketing messages.

Most users check their Facebook accounts more often than they check their email accounts, primarily due to mobile accessibility and connectivity across other social media platforms. As marketers, you need to stay up to date on how your audience is taking in their information, and this could be the next step.

With that said, email marketers need to realize their current subscribers may be changing their email addresses over to a Facebook address. Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations for Silverpop, tells CMO.com that “the Facebook platform is only going to hasten people to change 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 re-subscribing. And even if they do re-subscribe, you lose your history with them.”

For this 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.

Word of Mouth

The reason social media in general has become so attractive for marketers is that it’s basically the newest way to spread word of mouth. “Two-thirds of the world’s gross domestic product, especially in the United States, is driven by word-of-mouth recommendations,” according to McKinsey & Company and reported by Standard Media.

Will this new messaging platform make things even easier for word-of-mouth messages? It seems Facebook is trying to make connecting to people as easy as possible. For B2B marketers, the new email could make connecting to CEOs and other decision makers easier. LinkedIn is another source for this, but with everyone having an @facebook.com account, it makes it much easier.

Last March, Social Media Examiner found that “44% of social sharing on the web is driven by Facebook.” Another report on eMarketer shows that the most searched term for the second year in a row is Facebook, and that Facebook “topped Google.com as the most-visited website of the year.” No matter where you stand on how to implement social media, the point is your audience is likely on Facebook.

Too Soon?

Even with all of the statistics and possibilities the new messaging platform brings, the fact remains it isn’t launching to everyone yet. Meaning we really don’t know how important this system will be for marketers. Critics of marketing with Facebook argue that people on Facebook are not engaging in the buying experience, and changes need to be made to Facebook to facilitate conversions.

What are your thoughts? Do you think this messaging system will be a game-changer for marketers or just another feature Facebook offers? Leave your comments in the box below.

Want to make it easy for readers to share your great content with their tribes? If so, keep reading as I share six social media add-ons you can effortlessly integrate into your blog today. Your immediate result: much better engagement with your readers. And by the way, I’ve used them all—many on this very site.

An aside… The key to encouraging social activity is making it easy for people to act. The less friction there is between desire and action the more likely people will share your content or reach out to you. Fortunately these six excellent tools make encouraging activity easy—and dare I say, fun!

#1 TweetMeme—The Ultimate in Social Proof

In times past it was said that comments were the currency of bloggers. But far too often outstanding content only attracts a comment or two. What if there was a better way to determine if people like your posts (while also driving traffic to your blog)? Well now there is. Introducing TweetMeme’s Retweet Button.

TweetMeme’s button provides readers an effortless way to share your post on Twitter (and much more). Readers simply push a button and your post shows up on their Twitter feeds—driving more traffic to your page! But the real power is in the number it displays on your page. Every time anyone tweets about your article, TweetMeme tracks and displays a number on the page (whether they used the button or not).

This is one of the most powerful social barometers I have ever seen. The bigger the TweetMeme number, the more others feel compelled to read your content and share it.

You can add the TweetMeme badge anywhere on any page (blog or not). I like to display it at the top of the page. The higher the number, the more likely it broadcasts to readers, “Others think this is important, so you need to read this too!”

I really like the WordPress plugin (note that other platforms are also supported) because you can substitute your own Bit.ly account (a URL tracking service) and include your own Twitter ID in any retweets.

Here’s an added bonus. If one of your readers has a TweetMeme account (not required to use), when he or she clicks the “retweet” button, TweetMeme publishes the page to their Twitter account without leaving the page, a really powerful feature.

#2 DISQUS Comment System—The Ultimate in User Engagement

DISQUS is a VERY powerful comment system that takes over your existing blog’s comment functions and adds very powerful features. For example, with DISQUS readers can add video comments or leave comments using their Twitter or Facebook ID, and you can have multiple individuals moderate your comments.

I was a bit critical of DISQUS when I first reviewed it.  However, the service has since increased its features.

A few of my favorite capabilities include an indented comment stream (see image below) and the ability to add and display new comments without the page reloading. The experience is so user-friendly that I found people leaving a lot more comments after I installed DISQUS.

Also, if you have a free account with DISQUS, it recognizes you whenever you visit a site that uses the service. This means no need to type in your name and email, simply leave a comment.

A few pointers: As a commenter, you should register yourself with DISQUS. When you do, set up your name and website address so it will display properly when you leave a comment (under Profile | My Settings). So instead of non-identifiable ID I was assigned (like MikeS22) I can customize it to say “Michael Stelzner” and link to my site. If you do not do this, your name appears abbreviated and will not link back to your site, making it hard for folks to discover more about you based on your brilliant comments. While you’re in there, add an avatar or link to one from your Twitter account.

#3 Gravatar.com—Faces Make Comments Come to Life

Gravatar is a universal platform that displays a reader’s picture based on the email address he or she enters into a blog’s comment form. Thus, when you visit a blog and leave a comment, your email address is matched against the Gravatar database and your picture displays (see sample below). This only works if you have registered your email address with Gravatar and added a picture.

I’m pretty sure the latest versions of WordPress work automatically with Gravatar. However, if you are hosting an older WordPress blog, you’ll want to install WP-Gravatar for Gravatar support.

A few tips.  If you have multiple email accounts, set them all up under your Gravatar account to ensure your mug shot always appears, regardless of which email address you use.

#4 Sexy Bookmarks Plugin—The Easy Way to Share Great Content

There are a number of tools that allow your readers to share your post on different social networks, but none come close to Sexy Bookmarks.

This WordPress plugin allows you to display the social sites of your choosing and is visually appealing.  When a user “mouses over” an icon, it animates on the screen.  And yes, you change the “Sharing is sexy!” text.

The backend of this WordPress plugin is exceptionally sophisticated. For example, you can enter in your Bit.ly API code and the plugin will use your account to create tracing URLs.

#5 Twitter Follow Badge—The Simple Way to Grow Twitter Followers

Twitter Follow Badge creates a nifty little button that always remains on the page as users scroll through your content, making it easy for them to follow you on Twitter. You also can customize it to match the color scheme of your site and determine where you want it to live on the page.

The main benefit of this little widget is folks can easily follow you on Twitter.

#6 Meebo Me—Adding Live Chat to Your Page

Ever been to a website that said, “Click here to speak to a live agent”? How would you like something like that for your blog (or any web page for that matter)? You can with Meebo Me, a simple embedded chat system you can place on any page (or all pages) of your site.

This free service allows anyone to chat with you immediately. What’s cool about this is it integrates into all your other chat accounts. So now you can have them all in one interface AND still answer live questions from your readers.

This chat capability is very powerful and should also be used on your product landing pages.

So what do you think? Do you use any of these tools with success? Do you have others to share? I’d like to hear from you. Just type in your message below.