Skip to main content



SMS

GLOBAL – Just recently, we asked you to take part in a poll to find out how people communicate in this modern-age. How many people prefer to send an SMS, make a phone call or send an old fashioned letter? We’ve got all the details, read on.

When mobile phones were introduced a few decades ago, they were initially designed to allow you to make a call to another person. That was its sole purpose. Now, according to our poll, making calls is far from the most preferred way to communicate with others.

Coming first in our long list of possible answers, is SMS. Securing just over a fifth of the votes with a 21 percent. Sending a text message to someone is often easier than calling them. This way of communicating is silent and nobody knows you’re doing it which makes it easy to converse where it might not normally be possible. Plus, it’s easy to forget details in a phone call, it’s almost impossible in a text as it’s all written in black and white.

Email came in a close second, taking almost 19 percent of the votes. As with SMS, it’s a dead cert way of getting your message across without losing any of the details mentioned in the conversation. And as with SMS, it’s an easy way to talk to someone without making any noise – besides that constant tapping sound coming from people’s keyboards as their fingers hit the keys.

Even though it’s in third place, I’m glad to see that people are still using their phones for their original purpose, to make phone calls. It seems that the spoken word is still important for mobile phone users.

HowDoYouCommunicatePollResults


Larger version is available to download, under the Resources section on the right.

Although sending an SMS or an Email is great for details, it’s often easy to misunderstand the tone of what’s being said. That’s something that can only truly be understood from listening to someones voices. This reached 17 percent in our poll.

Hitting fourth place – with just over 10 percent – is Facebook. As hugely popular as social networks are, it seems that people aren’t using them as their main ways of communicating.

This fifth place contender surprised us a little, we thought it would score much higher in the list. Talking face-to-face with people scored a little over eight and a half percent. Obviously, we love our technology here at Conversations, but we hope that actually talking to people will never be phased out. What a grim world it would be if we all stayed indoors talking through servers and gateways. Get out there, enjoy the thrills of a face-to-face conversation.

We’ve just mentioned the main poll winners here, but we’ve included the image of the results for you to think about for yourself.

What do you make of the results? Are they what you expected? Discuss, below.

Image credit: Kiwanja