![\"SMS\"](\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/SMS.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAfter a decline in SMS volumes on Vodacom\u2019s South African network over the past five years, there has been a surprise increase in volumes over the last six months.<\/p>\n
The number of SMS messages sent on the Vodacom network per year peaked in 2011\/2012 at 6.5 billion, and steadily declined to 3.8 billion in 2015\/2016.<\/p>\n
The decline is closely linked to the growth in popularity of messaging services like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.<\/p>\n
Vodacom\u2019s annual results for the year ended 31 March 2017, however, show that this trend has\u00a0been broken.<\/p>\n
According to the results, 4.3 billion SMS messages were sent on the Vodacom network over the past 12 months.<\/p>\n
This is an increase of 576 million per year, which is a big surprise – especially considering the rise of WhatsApp in the country.<\/p>\n
The annual SMS volume growth in the last financial year was thanks to a spike in SMS volumes in the second part of the year.<\/p>\n
What makes the annual growth particularly impressive is that the first half of the year saw the lowest SMS volumes in a decade.<\/p>\n
Vodacom said the increase in the number of messages was primarily due to the \u201cPlay every day\u201d campaign (a competition with prizes) it started in December 2016.<\/p>\n
\u201cCustomers can use the My Vodacom App or our USSD platform to participate in the campaign,\u201d said Vodacom.<\/p>\n
After five years of declining SMS volumes on the Vodacom network, there has been a sharp increase in the number of messages sent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":172854,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[35,203,41,2594],"class_list":["post-211262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cellular","tag-headline","tag-sms","tag-vodacom","tag-whatsapp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211262"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211262"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":211526,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211262\/revisions\/211526"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\nNow read:\u00a0See how WhatsApp is killing SMS in South Africa<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"