Today Facebook launched the ability to reply to comments (status updates, photos, videos, and Wall posts) via email.

While this isn’t a major platform upgrade, it would appear that it will drive more engagement with Facebook.  This will occur for 3 main reasons:

1. Many of us live in our email therefore we’re likely to respond faster to an email then if we have to log in to Facebook to leave a follow up comment.
2. This reduces the number of steps required to post a response to Facebook once an email notification was received.  Prior to this upgrade you would receive the notification, click the link in the body of email, log in to Facebook, and then leave a comment.  Now, you receive the email notification, hit “Reply”, type your response and hit “Send”. Much simpler, if you ask me.
3. As ReadWriteWeb notes, employees who work at companies where Facebook is blocked will now be able to engage on Facebook throughout the course of the work day.  They may have been able to make these updates via a smartphone like an iPhone, Blackberry or Droid previously but the risk of getting caught is much higher.  We all know that person that we’ve seen with their head down in their lap all day long texting, playing on Facebook or checking Twitter from their phone.

In my experiences, I tend to respond faster when I can use email as the communications tool.  When I moved my blogs over the Disqus commenting system, I immediately began responding to comments faster because I could easily respond via email.  I think the same thing will happen with Facebook.  I do a decent job responding to comments on Facebook but definitely think that this will increase my engagement with the platform.

Over the past several months of working on my book, Facebook Marketing (affiliate link), it has been very interesting to watch Facebook continue to evolve.  Besides always trying to stay up on everything going around around the social web, I have kept a close eye on what’s happening with Facebook.

Now if they could just enable email notifications for Facebook Pages, the world would rejoice, fireworks would be shot from rooftops and we would all sing carols.  Well, maybe not the fireworks but it would still be very helpful for those of us who manage a Facebook Page, nevermind for those who manage a handful of them.

But, until that happens, I’ll focus on this newest update.  What do YOU think of this new update to Facebook?  Will you engage more via email?

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Photo Credit: Tom Whitnah