Islamabad: Pakistani nation has a great obsession with short text messaging as it has become the 5th biggest user of this service in the world, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said in a report.
Millions of mobile users in Pakistan send and receive bulk of messages daily. Sehrish, a resident of Islamabad, is one of them who sent and received over 1.5 billion of short text messages last year.
Only four countries in the world, including the US, the United Kingdom and Sweden are ahead of Pakistan in using this service.
PTA spokesman Khurram Mehran said that cheap tariffs being offered by mobile service providers in the country have attracted large scale usage of the service.
Living in a global village, short text messaging is now part of social contact. Apart from social aspect, large scale commercial usage of this service is one of the reasons behind its success. Introduction of mobile banking in the country is also making it popular among users. The service is also being used as low-cost marketing tool by small businesses.
In Heydri, posh area of Karachi, a group of eight-member is running a SMS marketing business for the last one year.
Sameer Malik, head of its HR department, said that India and other countries in the region are making lot of money by using this tool, but in Pakistan the trend has just started.
“We have around 200 clients right now and it’s a quite effective way of advertising and marketing,” he said, claiming it gives immediate results to the advertisers.
Small business runner s, shop keepers and those who cannot afford to launch advertisement campaigns on media can make their way by using this tool.
Last year when Pakistan was hit by flash floods, Faisal Chuhan, head of a software house in Karachi, came up with a unique idea of helping flood victims. Flood victims just had to send a message carrying name of their area at a given number and all this information were published in the form of map through a computer. Later, this information was provided to NGO’s working for flood victims.
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