Rebtel released results of its first Labor Day Communications study, which polled U.S. adults on communication trends and preferences when it comes to use of devices, services and platforms for work. Compiled from a survey taken on August 21 – August 23, the data suggests that 14.1% of U.S. adults (ages 17 and older) own their own business, and of those that do – 38.2% are multinational companies. Men were more likely to own their own business than females (17.3% vs. 10.2%), but women were more likely to indicate they own a multinational business (42.4% vs. 37.8%).
Some other findings include:
- 78% of respondents own between 1-2 mobile devices (including tablets, smartphones and feature phones), and 21.9% (or approx. 1-5 adults) own 3 devices or more.
- 25.3% claim to have a mobile device they use exclusively for business, but men were almost twice as likely as women to indicate this (32.0% vs. 17.4%).
- iPhone is the single most popular business device, capturing 33.0% of respondents, followed by Android at 27.0%, iPad at 23.8% and BlackBerry at 16.8%.
- Among smartphone owners, women were more likely to indicate owning an iPhone than men (36.2% vs. 32.6%), whereas men were much more likely to indicate owning an Android device (33.8% vs. 26.6%).
- Of those who use a mobile device exclusively for work, women were 20% more likely to use an iPhone than men (36.8% vs. 30.6%), whereas men were approximately 50% more likely to use an Android (30.6% vs. 19.3%).
- When it comes to BlackBerry usage, among the respondents using it exclusively for work, women are the majority (26.3% vs. 12.1%).
- iPhone owners (17.3%) were 50% more likely than Android owners (11.9%) to claim that they own their own business.
- 28% of adults use a third-party messaging app or service for work that is not provided from their existing carrier. VoIP apps like Skype and Rebtel were most common, totaling more than 70% of respondents (71.7%), while social networking apps were second with usage among 56.6% of adult workers. Surprisingly, Instant Messenger was fourth at 42.4%, with group messaging apps like Kik and WhatsApp, trailing at 34.1%.
- Among social networking apps used for work, Facebook is unsurprisingly most preferred with 75.5% of respondents, followed by Twitter (21.1%) and Instagram (12.3%). 20.1% claim to not use social networking sites for work at all.
- Voice is still a major part of work communications, with 51.4% using voice at least an hour a day, with 36.5% using voice between 2-5 hours each day.
- The number of Americans who use voice for work appears to be increasing with 45.8% saying they use Voice about the same as last year, and 41.4% saying they plan to use Voice more than last year.
- Finally, in terms of communications preference if respondents could only choose one method, Voice is vastly more popular than runner-up email (53.1% vs. 33.7% respectively), followed by Instant Messaging (10.8%), with social networks lagging far behind at (2.5%).
Rebtel’s Labor Day Communications report was conducted among 753 U.S. mobile users using SurveyMonkey.
