Teens point the way to Texting Trends (averaging 2900 txt per month)

QWASI works with advertisers and brands of all sizes and demographics. However, when we first officially launched our services in the market place in 2005, we were immediately hit with the comment “who texts” or “my teenager sends a few each month” and most aged 35-54 claimed they didn’t use it or even know how to text. Now they are without excuse – because only the smallest population doesn’t text.

During the second quarter of 2008, a typical U.S. mobile subscriber placed or received 204 phone calls each month. In comparison, the average mobile customer sent or received 357 text messages per month — a 450% increase over the number of text messages circulated monthly during the same period in 2006. (Nielsen Mobile, September 2008)

Nielsen Mobile released a new study on “How Teens Use Media” and reveled new information on the rise of mobile usage for this demographic.

Here are some excerts from their study:

Of all the mobile behaviors of teens, texting is most talked about. Fingers fying and phone cameras fashing, 83% of U.S. mobile teens use text-messaging and 56% use MMS/picture messaging. The average U.S. mobile teen now sends or receives an average of 2,899 text-messages per month compared to 191 calls.

The average number of texts has gone up 566% in just two years, far surpassing the average number of calls, which has stayed nearly steady.

More than half of all U.S. teen mobile subscribers (66%) say they actually prefer text-messaging to calling. Thirty-four percent say it’s the reason they got their phone. Still, texting isn’t the only means of communicating with teens over the mobile phone. Teens are avid users of a wide variety of advanced mobile data features. More than a third of teens download ringtones, Instant Message or use the mobile Web, while about a quarter of U.S. teens download games and applications.

Teenager Mobile Usage

To a lesser extent, teens are using video messaging (26%), watching mobile video (18%) and using location-based services on their phone (16%). There is a popular notion that teens in the U.S., indeed U.S. subscribers at large, may be far behind subscribers in other markets in terms of mobile data use. In fact, U.S. teens have adopted mobile media more quickly than in many of the markets Nielsen tracks. Consider mobile Web: as of Q1 2009, 37% of U.S. mobile subscribers 13–17 accessed the Internet on their phone—this ranks U.S. teens second, behind 50% of China’s mobile teens, in terms of mobile Internet penetration. With all of this expanding mobile activity, schools and parents are stepping in to set parameters. Sixty-two percent of U.S. mobile teens say that parents have placed at least one restriction on their mobile use. Ninety-three percent say that their school has.

At home, 24% of teen mobile subscribers said they were not allowed to use the phone at dinner, 22% were required to make certain grades, 21% had a limited number of minutes and 13% had a limited number of text-messages. At school, 77% of mobile teens say they are not permitted to use their phone in class and 50% are restricted from using it during assemblies. As teens around the world continue to adopt mobile phones, mobile media and messaging, marketers will be paying attention. Mobile marketing offers the most personal and direct form of engagement for an audience that, as this paper demonstrates, is spread broadly across the media ecosystem. Moreover, teens seem to be particularly open to the idea of mobile advertising. A 2008 study by Nielsen found that teen mobile media users were roughly three times as receptive to mobile advertising as the total subscriber population: just over half of teen mobile media users considered themselves open to mobile advertising.

However, while these trends are most revealing about teenagers, they happen to strike a chord at home too. Why? It’s a universal trend.

David Crystal, author of the book “txtng: the gr8 db8” (Oxford University Press), said that the idea that texting is still just a youth thing is a lingering myth of the past, and that moms learning to text has been a driving force around the world. AT&T also confirmed this is their own research conducted last year that showed 50% of moms and dads started first texting because of their teens. “The trend is pretty universal,” said Crystal, a linguistics professor in Wales. “It’s even more noticeable in places that have taken up cellphones even more obsessively than in the United States, places like Japan and China and the Philippines.”

So if the average number of text messages sent has gone up for this demographic over 500% in the last two years, how do you think it trends for Mom and Dads on the go – a key demographic for most brands. Let’s also look out 5 years and you will quickly see that this has ginormous implications for brands ignoring the mobile revolution.

Don’t forget, by the time the ink drys on these strudies, the numbers are even larger…. So get mobile. Let QWASI help take you there.

October 1, 2009 in Blog   |   1 Comment

ATT has Best Performance & Most Reliable for Mobile Messaging

A good friend of ours at Keynote Systems, the network monitoring company that tracks and monitors performance in various locations, has a compelling set of numbers in his email signature. I am ALWAYS shocked to see how well some networks perform over others. You know what I mean whether it’s ‘America’s Most Reliable Wireless Network’ or as another hangs their hat on ‘More Bars in More Places’ – but how do they really compare? And what does each mobile user care about most at the end of the day? Service that just works when we need it to work.

So these results may shock some of you:

Want to learn more about these numbers and how they impact your business, give our friends at Keynote a call. Tal Turner can be reached at 650-403-3435 or via email: tal.turner @ keynote.com (tell him Dave from QWASI sent you). He’ll have a good laugh.

July 13, 2009 in Blog   |   No Comments