Social Media Tools: SMS

Tue, 01/12/2009 - 18:23 — Pete Callaghan

SMS (or "text messaging" to you and me) may not be new and exciting anymore, but it is certainly a tool valued by mobile phone users.

Let me throw in a few random statistics to give you an idea of just how valuable SMS is:

"We send more texts each week in the UK than we sent in a whole year in 1999."

"7.7 billion texts sent in the UK in July 2009."

"337 million texts sent on Xmas day alone in the UK 2008."

Get the idea? Much of Social Media may be shiny and new, but SMS has yet to lose its sparkle. In contrast to (say) Twitter, growth in text messages shows no sign of stopping.

OK, most people are familiar with texting, but what has it got to do with Social Media?

Well, consider the role that social media plays in the relationships between you and your audience: it provides many ways in which you can converse with your audience. In this respect, SMS is just one of hundreds of different social media tools both new and old.

Another principle to remember when planning your social media strategy is "follow your audience". In other words, you should be active in the social media that your audience already use and value. It's a pretty safe bet that a large proportion of your audience already cherishes mobile.

"SMS is Expensive, Difficult and Intrusive"

Not at all. SMS is a very mature communication tool with a wide variety of powerful and cost-effective services for sending and receiving messages. Integration into existing systems is typically very easy, especially for out-going messages.

Best practice use of text messages is well established and well documented so there is no excuse for upsetting mobile phone users with inappropriate messages.

On the whole, text messaging remains a medium relatively free from abuse, which is one of the reasons that the vast majority of text messages received are read by the recipients.

What sort of messaging suits SMS? Although a basic message can contain just 160 characters, combining messages or embedding web links means you can send pretty well anything. The range of uses applied to text messaging is mind-boggling so I'm not going to attempt a representative (let alone comprehensive) list. Here's a random selection off the top of my head: