Text messaging may be the most undervalued and underused social sharing channel. PR and marketing professionals may be underestimating how much of their content is shared via text messaging, also known as Short Message Service (SMS).
Jamie Mottram, director of content development at the USA Today Sports Media Group, which includes the sports website For The Win (FTW), predicted that more media outlets will add SMS share buttons to their content. FTW found that its SMS sharing buttons were being used three to four times more than its Twitter buttons. The site decided to remove its Twitter buttons and keep email, SMS, WhatsApp and Facebook sharing buttons.
“It’s not that Twitter is insignificant for us, it’s just that mobile users weren’t really using the tweet-to-share buttons, so we took them away,” Mottram told Digiday. “It was an experiment at first, but share rates went up, so we stuck with it.”
In addition, BuzzFeed News revealed in tweets to the Nieman Journalism Lab that its SMS share buttons generate the most shares in its news app, followed by Twitter, email and Facebook in that order. BuzzFeed’s Stacy-Marie Ishmael admitted she was surprised by the popularity of text messaging.
Consider the Humble SMS
Results from FTW and BuzzFeed News indicate that more publishers as well as marketers may wish to add SMS share buttons, observers point out. Chat applications such as Snapchat, WhatsApp and others have gained attention as distribution platforms. “But don’t forget about humble old SMS. If you make it easier for your readers to share via text on mobile, they just might take you up on the offer,” writes Joshua Benton, Nieman Journalism Lab director.
Adding SMS social sharing buttons might be relatively easy for many publishers and marketers, according to Econsultancy. Companies with native apps can typically add SMS sharing to their apps with little software coding. Adding SMS buttons to mobile websites is also possible with little coding. Companies using popular third-party sharing services can easily enable SMS sharing since services like Shareaholic and ShareThis offer SMS sharing options.
Text message sharing is known as part of “dark social” because it cannot be tracked or measured by conventional web analytics. While email and instant messages are the most common dark social channels, others include messaging apps like Snapchat. Despite the term, marketers and PR pros can in fact track the messages that contain tagged links.
Bottom Line: Publishers and marketers may be ignoring social sharing and engagement via text messaging, or SMS. Websites may be able to substantially increase reach of their content by adding SMS sharing buttons.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
