This is officially my first blog post! (well, at least a blog called Teresa and dedicated to Teresa’s thoughts)
SMS will take a very important part of my posts and there is a good explanation for that. I have spent 5 years of my life working in the text messaging industry and with my current professional interests in Community Management, I spend most of my time reading about SMS in some form or another – news, articles, blogs, forums, Q&A’s…
Lately, I keep hearing that SMS is becoming old-fashioned and that mobile applications are overtaking some of the areas in which text messaging used to be the main communication channel.However, if that was the case, why are there signs everywhere that lead me to think the opposite?
Many companies stick to text messaging and new ones are adopting it. Companies as successful as McDonalds and Gap have launched text message marketing campaigns in the last few years and they are major established brands, that are not going anywhere and have the resources to use the best technology.
Leaving aside the main functionality of SMS for person to person interaction that we all use to tell our partners how late we are for dinner, and focusing on the Application to Business SMS interaction, there are still a lot of things that can be achieved with this technology. Text messaging is not only used for marketing but to communicate key information events such as time-critical alerts, banking, updates, reminders, mobile campaigns… When this kind of transactions are performed via SMS, there are a number of advantages that can’t be beat by any other new way of communication or technology, not even mobile apps.
What are some of the main advantages that make Application to Person (A2P) SMS communication unique and that will allow it to stay with us for quite a few years?
-Messaging performance and cost – it is reliable and cheap.
-Instant communication and interaction between a service provider and a client. Text messaging can go both directions : Business to Person and Person to Business.
-Companies also benefit of mobile receipts which allow you to get acknowledgement for your SMS. This is highly popular and successful in the financial-services industry as it provides you with the status of your message ,meaning greater certainty that your message will be delivered or that you will know if it wasn’t!
-You can reach users globally and by using solutions like Virtual numbers for incoming messages, users will even be able to reply from almost anywhere in the world.
-Think of how many people nowadays carry a phone and it is the first thing they check when they wake up and the last one before they go to sleep.
-Don’t forget that many people in different countries still do not have smart phones and also in some countries phones are more prevalent than the PC and internet, so there is an ubiquity to SMS reach.
Summarizing, yes I believe in the future of SMS and that is why it made it to my first post 🙂
teresaysumundoprofesional 