Why Some Companies Favor SMS Marketing Over Social Media

The question of how your social media content gets seen has always held an element of the unknown. Some might say even a bit of mystery. You’ve heard that there are complex algorithms that determine how your content is displayed, but accessing or disentangling them may leave you even more puzzled.

Who controls what your followers see?

Then there’s the issue of shadow banning, which is the practice of platforms silencing controversial posts, or posts they possibly disagree with, by simply sealing those posts from others’ eyes. The poster can share content freely, not realizing that nobody else is seeing it.

There’s debate as to whether this practice is real, but there’s some data that demonstrates that conservative voices are more likely to be silenced. For instance, there was a small study examining Twitter suspensions in the years between 2015 and 2019. Of the 22 profiles suspended, 21 had expressed support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, and the single suspension that can’t be linked to Trump was the account of Rose McGowan. McGowan’s suspension was due to the sharing of a telephone number, a clear violation of Twitter rules.

This doesn’t mean that Twitter is actively silencing conservatives or Trump supporters. It could be that these posters were simply more likely to break Twitter’s rules about hate speech or other guidelines.

Whether shadow banning is real or not, the resulting outcome is the same: social media platforms are changing the power structure of how information is shared. There are not yet clear rules in place that govern censorship or free speech on these sites, and many decisions are up to the owners of the sites. Legislation struggles to keep up with technology.

The Solution: Create an SMS Network

Meanwhile, you have a convenient, cost-effective, and easy way to bypass the entire question.

Short Message Service (SMS) gives you the opportunity to have complete control over who sees your messaging. You not only choose your recipients, but you also have control over the timing, frequency, and content of your messages.

Here are a few of the ways you can use SMS to augment a direct mail campaign or digital marketing:

• Highlight your message at the height of a big campaign, to announce the deadline of a promotional event, or remind your audience of a big discount.
• Time your messages to the specific arc of a marketing campaign.
• Create highly personalized messages that can be sent out to subsets of your target audience.
• Engage in conversations that build trusted relationships when your recipients respond to your SMS message.

Also, consider the effectiveness of SMS marketing:

• SMS has a 90% open rate, compared to 20% for email marketing.
• The average person responds to a text message within 90 seconds.
• Once they’ve opted in, 75% of people say they don’t mind receiving a promotional message via SMS.
• Click-through rates vary widely, but most estimates put them at about 5-10% for SMS.

SMS marketing can be part of a highly-effective omnichannel strategy that helps you reach out to audiences across multiple platforms and formats.

If you’d like to see an example of how to create an SMS network, watch this short 3-minute video.  You can also try out the system directly by texting us a question at 504-688-3456.

Take control of your network. Create an SMS Network today. Visit www.mySMSnetwork.com today.