Twilio is a rapidly growing, cloud communications company based in San Francisco. Twilio provides a platform for both SMS messaging and voice — and also for a very flexible cloud PBX, which is called OpenVBX. MediaFunnel leverages Twilio’s SMS functionality and API for multiple uses:
- Posting by Internal Users (Contributor, Publisher and Administrator roles)
- Guest Posting (anonymous, moderated posting into social media channels)
- Brand Alerts to MediaFunnel Users via SMS
SMS Short Codes vs. Long Numbers
For MediaFunnel’s application of SMS, integration with Twilio provides our customers with a much less expensive alternative to short codes — the alternative is ten digit phone numbers, also known as long numbers. Twilio has an inventory of SMS long numbers for almost any U.S. area code.
Because SMS short codes are expensive (up to $1,000 per month in the U.S.), companies that promote texting at events or at retail locations, for example, often ask their audience or customers to key in prefixes. For example, I recently attended an event that had a text crawler on the big screens that prompted the audience to “text SHOUT plus your message to 4xxxx”. It’s common for short codes to be shared among brands.
Texting to Social Media Channels at Events
A single purpose, ten digit phone number with an area code that’s local to an event can make it easier for an audience to contribute content compared to using a short code. In addition, a long number can be dedicated to an event, which makes it easier to promote a number that’s associated with an event. Finally, with MediaFunnel’s Guest Posting, audience SMS texts can be published not only to an event’s big screen, but also to social media channels for greater marketing reach.
