Are you texting admissions results?

Millennials text. The love it. They use it all the time with their friends to stay in touch. And now, even the parents are jumping on board.

A report from Iconculture had this to say:

Credit Millennials with getting their folks to text. 20% of 55- to 64-year-olds are tapping out messages in 2008, up from 13% just two years ago, according to a Sprint study. And three quarters of those texters are messaging their kids (MarketWatch 10.22.08).

Staying in touch with offspring in college drives many Boomers to write with their thumbs. So does the rapid response time: kids under 30 are four times more likely to reply to a text within minutes, compared with a voicemail message.

To get a response from that busy millennial, parents and even grand-parents are using texts to communicate, in lieu of email and phone calls.

So why shouldn’t your admissions office send text messages to let students know they got admitted, to send them reminders of upcoming recruitment events (like a web chat, nudge, nudge) or alerts on critical application deadlines? Heck, most Millennials we talked to in the research for our white paper preferred texts to emails.

So what are you waiting for?

In my next post I’ll explain how to use the free Textmarks service to setup a community to communicate with interested applicants via SMS.