VoIP service provider Rebtel recently ran a study through Harris Interactive on what people used to communicate with friends, family, and coworkers. Around 2,300 folks across the U.S. in a variety of age categories weighed in on their favourite method for keeping in touch, between voice calls, e-mail, instant messaging, through social networks, or otherwise. Although e-mail is used broadly across all categories, the most preferred across the board is voice calling. This is something that’s easy to forget when the emphasis on so many smartphones are their data capabilities, and how prominently messaging and app usage ranks among smartphone owners.
59% picked voice as their top choice for communicating with family, 43% for talking with work colleagues, 38% use it first among friends. The study also broke up the data by gender, and showed that men overwhelmingly preferred to use voice over women, which surprised me, but then again, the last study Harris did showed men used VoIP more. Although text messaging played third wheel to calling and e-mail in most cases when it came to the top pick, SMS was used by between 40% – 60% of respondents across all categories at least occasionally. Social networking figured in prominently, though microblogging (i.e. Twitter) and video calling both saw negligible usage.
Personally, I spend way more time chewing through e-mails and social networks than I do taking calls, but that’s just me; what about you guys? What’s your preferred method of touching base, outside of actually meeting up with someone?
