Texting or WhatsApp, it's all the same," my neighbor, my aunt or my favorite restaurant owner used to tell me... I don't remember.
Really?
Well, not at all. No.
While both have for years heralded the advent of written conversation to the detriment of calls and traditional voice messages, their use has only become more differentiated in recent years.
SMS is now :
- Event-driven, because I want to make my mark, it's a mark of ultra closeness to my contact.
- Professional, both in terms of promotional SMS campaigns and as a channel for colleagues to avoid the personal sphere of instant messaging.
- Utility, how many SMS messages I receive to confirm a purchase, authenticate myself, validate a reservation, etc.
- Enriched, year after year, from the obvious emojis to avatars, stickers and other effects quickly tested and quickly abandoned
- Boring? It's true that I rarely wait impatiently for a text message, because that's not where my most interesting interactions take place...
At its almost exact opposite, messaging is :
- A conversation: continuous, permanent, asynchronous
- Multi-modal: images, sound, video, sharing of other digital content and, of course, voice messages in more and more cases.
- Emotional: we're on the ultimate intimacy channel, sharing my photo, my availability, opening a door on my cell phone.
- A concentrate of technology: behind the simple conversation display, WhatsApp and Messenger, for example, have been constantly evolving for years, with an almost invisible force. Every change, every adjustment (apart from the bitterly debated privacy issues, which are not the issue here) has been made in a soft, almost imperceptible way. The best examples? The search system within a conversation, a function that had previously been almost impossible to find and never used, is now immediately available in the interface. The system of replying to each conversation "bubble" has also become a classic feature. And more recently, channels has announced a new, more one-to-many approach!
- A light touch when it comes to collecting data: who hasn't been surprised to find that they're not receiving their text messages, but that WhatsApp is already displaying unread conversations?
- Universal: as easy to use as SMS, installed or almost installed by default on every smartphone or as soon as it is downloaded, 2M users...
- Accessible: everywhere and in every zone with disconcerting ease, no need for an operator or sim card, just a wifi terminal and you're ready to go.
As you'll have gathered by now, we like SMS in its current role and for having brought people into the era of conversational writing, but we feel that the comparison with messaging's little brother, now grown up, is no longer relevant. Messaging today is a matter of course in terms of numbers, with 1 billion messages exchanged every day, mainly for business reasons. And above all, in terms of volume of use, with countries where a WhatsApp operating bug is now more of a concern than a power cut.
So, the badmouths won't stop saying that it's no good having everything go through the messaging systems of a technology giant, or object that the coverage of these messaging systems isn't universal.
Seriously?
Seriously, the volume of data we're already leaving to the famous GAFAs is staggering every day. Who wants to do without all the digital services we use in our daily lives, in our cars, from our sofas? Nobody wants to do it seriously. And if there are any true/false privacy advocates or anti-Meta or anti-Google people left, the proportion of people they represent simply makes them a totally marginal marketing cohort that won't be in your target audience. Duly noted.
Seriously, WhatsApp and Messenger "only" cover 60 to 70% of the population in terms of equipment. Let a competent CMO find a media lever that by default covers 60% of the population via a single audience pool, and we can talk about this objection, which is ultimately a bit fanciful.
So yes, we're with a single player most of the time, but the power of what it enables us to do is well worth a few audience giveaways that can be compensated for.
At this point, I'd like to take the opportunity to kill the myth of the conversational SMS. It doesn't really mean that much, when you think about it. As we've seen, most SMS messages are informative. It doesn't have any real substance from a strictly conversational point of view. At most, with your +1 or your granny. Even then.
That said, the real place for conversational communication is, and will be even more so in the future, messaging, where, as in real life, conversation can be punctuated by images, reactions and, soon, transactions.
Only the advent of the RCS can reshuffle the cards, so let's wait a little longer for the "arlesienne" that it is to make this article obsolete at last!
Until then, thanks to SMS for paving the way, and make way for messaging 😉