Twitter vs. SMS

We all know that Twitter and SMS were born for different reasons. Twitter came to us to provide a platform for microblogging while SMS was invented to let you send messages to your friends.

This title is a bit misleading because I am not trying to compare these two services(technologies) in terms of pros and cons or argue which one is better when it comes to mobile marketing. But I want to point out that there was a time when people would think mobile marketing equals SMS marketing, and one thing is obvious now: we don't live in that era any longer.

Other forms of messaging services such as Twitter are becoming more and more available on mobile phones thanks to the rapid growth of mobile internet and popularity of touch screen smart phones such as the iPhone.

My question is: Is SMS marketing actually competing with Twitter business now? or Are Twitter and other forms of HTTP-based messaging services going to revolutionize everything in mobile marketing in the near future?

Well, I have no idea. I could only come up with some silly example like Barack Obama might be paying a large sum of money for SMS services to reach out to people if there was no Twitter and his 768,759 followers on it.

So, I did some research on Google with "Twitter vs. SMS" keywords and found some interesting blogs which I want to share:

Mellow Machines

The author has an interesting opinion. "Twitter as a service might not compete with SMS today in terms of reach and revenue. It might not replace SMS, but I think time and momentum are on the side of HTTP-based messaging cracking into aspects of the SMS market eventually."

He also shares a very interesting experience he had at iPhone developer conference (360|iDev) where Twitter was the central medium for attendee networking and meta-conversations during sessions.

I agree to his idea that HTTP-based messaging is becoming more and more mainstream. So the question is how we're going to embrace services like Twitter to our advantage so that we can re-sell its services to our clients as added value to our services.

Since I am a tech guy, this is the first thing that came to my mind "why not add twitter as additional entry source?" We currently have 3 different entry sources, SMS, Web and email. So why not twit? For example, we can use our moderation service to filter out offensive Twitter messages before sending out to big screens. Well, it doesn't sound that compelling, but I am just brainstorming.

Finally, watch this funny video too good to miss (also found on the same blog).