How texting changed internet marketing and social media

Last December saw the lots of articles and interviews to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the text. This blog reflects on the impact the popularity of texting has had on internet marketing and the work of the social media marketing agency.

Oddly, its least impact has come as a marketing tool. Consumers have been resistant to receiving marketing updates via text, and few companies of medium or small size include SMS marketing as part of their marketing mix. The overall lesson for businesses and the social media marketing agency is that marketing messages need to be concise and concentrated. If you can deliver your message in text-like length, then you are likely to win the attention of any target audience. We are not entirely convinced people have shorter attention spans – there are many reasons to believe the reverse is true – but as consumers they certainly want to receive marketing messages in a much more concentrated form – whether via Twitter, YouTube, Facebook etc. The success of the text also indicated that technology could change communications, and this has driven much marketing activity since. Consumer’s willingness to change how they communicate has since bought us Facebook, Twitter, Smartphones, iPads and lots of future technology as yet undreamt of. The hardware became more affordable and the programmes much sophisticated, but that would have meant little if people were unwilling to adapt to a whole new way of communicating. A less obvious influence that texting has had on the job of a social media marketing agency is its effect on language. Texting soon developed its own vocabulary. In fact it developed several vocabularies for all sorts of diverse groups. Marketers learned that language was much more flexible, that different groups of consumers literally communicated in a different language – and that being unable to respond to this meant lost opportunities for companies ad their marketing teams.  Marketing no longer had a ‘Queens English’ to rely on, and whereas dialects were fasting fading, a whole new series of groups had developed their own grammars and language use. And this was reflected in all their future communication, not restricted to texting only. It looks as if the SMS message is on the decline, and may not be around to celebrate another 40^th – but its influence will never be forgotten. Remember to watch this space as we will be releasing a range of social media marketing blogs over the coming months. Our readers can also find our Opace Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/OpaceWebDesign. For all the latest goings on, you can keep up-to-date with Opace on Twitter https://twitter.com/OpaceWeb. And we also now have an Opace YouTube page live at http://www.youtube.com/user/opacewebdesign.

Image credit – cackhanded