According to numbers published by Royal Pingdom in 2009, the estimated number of emails sent per day was around 247 billion. Unfortunately 80% of those are thought to be spam and viruses. With junk and spam filters working overtime it’s no wonder people are finding alternatives to email when communicating with their friends, family and colleagues. Over the past decade widespread adoption of Instant Messaging and SMS has opened up alternative digital channels for people to send and receive quick messages and data.

More recently social media platforms have provided yet another viable alternative to email. Over 4 billion messages are sent through Facebook every day by 350,000 million of its 600,000 users. Twitter recently topped over 50 million tweets sent per day, which certainly must include thousands of Direct Messages between users.

In a recent poll of 1000 members of our AskingCanadians™ panel we asked, “Which of the following applications do you most often use instead of email?”

SOURCE: AskingCanadians™

It came as no surprise that we saw that Facebook at 27.6 percent was the most popular alternative to email. SMS Texting was next at 16.2 percent, Instant Messaging was third with 15.9 percent and well behind at 1 percent was Twitter. When we broke the results out by gender it became evident that woman are using Facebook much more than men as an alternative to email by nearly 20%. It also appears that more men have been slower to abandon email (43.1 percent hanging on vs 34.1 percent of women) and instant messaging (18.7 percent usage vs 11.7 percent of women).

Smartphone users accessing their social media platforms has increased by more than 8.3 percent over the previous year and now stands at 30.8%. In fact access to Facebook via mobile browsers grew 112 percent and Twitter grew by a staggering 347 percent. Based on this increased usage of mobile to access and send messages through social media platforms, we can surely expect to see email usage shrink even more in the coming years.