Posted on 23rd October 2012 by Marketing Americas
If there’s one thing that both Democrats and Republicans can agree on this election season, it’s that political participation is going mobile – with text messaging emerging as a particularly useful tool.
That’s according to a new survey from the Pew Center for Internet. The study said that 88 percent of registered voters own a cell phone of some type. This pervasive availability of mobile devices has made mobile a very convenient way to engage. (A question for another time, however, is “who are the 12 percent that don’t own a cell phone?”)
As for the use of SMS: 75% of the cell-owning registered voters use their phone to send or receive text messages, and within this group:
- 19% have sent text messages related to the campaign to friends, family members, or others
- 5% have signed up to receive text messages directly from a candidate or other group involved in the campaign
- 5% say that they have received unwanted election-related text messages that they did not sign up to receive
Apps have much less impact on political participation. In fact, the survey found that only 45% of the cell phone owners used apps, and only 8% of these used a political app. The number one usage category, of course, was reading political news and social media comments from a smart phone (45%).
It’s easy to see from the survey that the use of mobile phones and text messaging could increase dramatically. For example 35% of the survey respondents said they used their phone to fact check a candidate. Perhaps one of the fact check companies could offer a text messaging service with results of their research.
When it comes to running any kind of text message campaign – political, marketing or otherwise – the Clickatell Global SMS Gateway is famous for its reach – both in the U.S. and across the globe – and features easy to use interfaces and APIs to make it easy to deploy.
Now, we won’t get caught up in bashing the other candidates for your SMS votes, but we will remind you that: This is Clickatell and we approve this message.
