What media air travelers choose to inform their friends and relatives about their flights, provided with a choice between SMS, email and social media? See our latest stats on that topic.

ArrivedOK is the service that notifies your designated recipients about your arrival to airports worldwide. ArrivedOK doesn’t do this by tracking flights, it does it by tracking your cell phone when you switch it on in your destination. Once it has been detected as on in the visiting mobile network the arrival notifications are sent out automatically. Users can choose how to send those alerts – by SMS, email, or via social media/networks.

And here comes the interesting part – what media air travelers choose to deliver their arrival alerts? Our latest stats say that despite all that social media buzz, people still prefer SMS and good old email. Perhaps because email notifications are free of charge at ArrivedOK, one might say, but that’s not the case: ArrivedOK provides all social media alerts for free too but they show dramatically lower popularity.

Here is the percentage of all ArrivedOK arrival notifications by media channels (March 2009 – January 2010):

LinkedIn is not included in the stats as we just integrated recently.

One thing could explain the popularity of SMS among our users – ArrivedOK text alerts are remarkably cheaper than roaming text tariffs, but that does not explain the lower usage of social media services, which are completely free.

We would say that Twitter is doing fine, Facebook is overrated, and Blogspot and LiveJournal numbers reflect the decline of blogging.

This is basically European stats as we don’t currently provide the service in the United States and China (though we’re working on it).

ArrivedOK website – http://www.arrivedok.mobi
ArrivedOK Partnership – http://partners.arrivedok.mobi

Watch ArrivedOK video tutorial in English updated with female character and voice-over. Learn how ArrivedOK looks like from the inside and how to use it – in only 3 minutes.

Watch ArrivedOK video tutorial in English. Learn how it looks like from the inside and how to use it – in only 3 minutes.

SMS

An interesting reading at TrendWatchList where SMS is predicted to top travel, and especially tracking services.

It directly relates to ArrivedOK but may also help you with other services where you need to spread news on the go via SMS.

A lot of people know about it. It is called … Twitter! In Russia the closest service is called SMSter.

For those, who are unfamiliar:

You can send an SMS or email from wherever you are (including an automatic one from ArrivedOK) and the message will appear in your stream which you have on the web to which people can subscribe, which you can embed in your blog, etc. Usually friends would subscribe to your stream and if they turn on SMS notification, they will receive your news right on their mobile phones. Thus one SMS can spread to many SMS.

The Russian variant works similarly.