Ann Wilkinson is Marketing Manager for Esendex, the SMS messaging provider. We provide SMS services including Email to SMS, Web SMS, PC SMS and SMS API.
Business SMS – the sending and receiving of SMS via a PC as part of day to day business communications – is a rapidly growing channel. Typically users take advantage of Web SMS or Email to SMS tools, or integrate their own systems with a Business SMS service using an SMS API.
The Mobile Data Association recently published an excellent report highlighting its use by SMEs in particular. As an indicator of the growth of this sector, Esendex’s own traffic is growing by almost 100% pa and other SMS providers report similar growth.
However, there is also a view that SMS will be overtaken by communication channels such as Mobile Email, Instant Messaging or social media tools such as Twitter. There are certainly some staggering statistics around Twitter – Hitwise reported this month that their traffic was 500% up on the same period last year – despite their outages.
But one needs to be careful to strip the “US effect” within these statistics and the underlying assumptions. With a “Receiver pays” model, texting just didn’t take off in the States and alternative channels have been relatively more successful here than elsewhere in the world. This and the desire to spot the next “big thing” has contributed to a US-dominated investor sentiment which has trickled down to a general market view.
Even so, this misses the point that SMS is already a global phenomenon: it is the most widely used data application in the world with 2.4 billion active users. That doesn’t mean that SMS, and Business SMS in particular, will necessarily replace other communication channels – it should be viewed as part of the mix.
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