How to Use Proper Text Message Etiquette

Video Transcript

"I'm Ben from the Cellphone Broker in San Jose, California. Today, I'm going to show you what proper text messaging etiquette is. Most people, when they receive text messages, they don't want to see volatile content. They want to see, you know, a nice straightforward messaging. That's what text messaging is all about. Text messaging in the...in the industry, the cell phone industry, is commonly referred to as SMS. SMS stands for short message service, which means that the text message should be pretty straightforward and right to the point instead of wasting time. So text messages or SMS messages are limited to 160 characters, which means you need to not waste as much time with other letters and characters and get straight to the point. So if you're sending a message, let's say for example, "I will meet you at four o'clock." Instead of saying...spelling out the letters F-O-U-R, you should just use the number four. If you're sending something like, "I will meet you," instead of spelling out Y-O-U, for you, just use the letter U. So for example, for the word "account," you would just put acct instead of spelling out the entire word because spelling out the entire word is just going to waste a bunch of texting characters and, you know, it costs money to send text messages. On average, it's about 12 cents per text message, depending upon which carrier you use. So any abbreviation that you normally use in a day-to-day basis when you're...when you're doing average writing is usually pretty good. But, you know, like I said, if you want to...if you want to save money and save characters and text messages, you should cut it down and not use big words. Just abbreviate it down to the first three letters or so. I'm Ben from the Cellphone Broker in San Jose. You can log onto our website at myspace.com/cellphonebroker."