Trends on Tuesday: Text vs. Voice

Mobile is not just apps and websites, it includes SMS or text messaging. Here’s some new text use data from Pew Internet & American Life.

Some 83% of American adults own cell phones and three-quarters of them (73%) send and receive text messages.–Pew

How do mobile phone users prefer to be contacted?

(53%) say that they prefer a voice call, compared with 31% who say that they prefer to be contacted via text message. An additional 14% say that the contact method they prefer depends on the situation.

While most people prefer a call, heavy text users definitely prefer text.
a majority of cell owners prefer a phone call when someone needs to reach them, active text messaging users are much more likely to prefer texting to calling. Just under half (45%) of texters who send or receive 21-50 text messages per day say that they prefer it when people contact them using text messaging, while a majority of those who send or receive more than 50 texts per day (55%) say that text messaging is their preferred mode of contact (just 27% of these users prefer to be reached by voice call).

Lessons for government? Pay attention to your users to make sure you are reaching them in the ways they expect.

Read more from Pew on Americans and Text Messaging here.

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Sep 20th, 2011 | Posted in Research, Trends
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