The new Pew Internet and American Life Project report has been issued this week.  It won’t come as news to anyone that teens are texting a lot.  But here are a few fun facts:

• 74% of 12-17 year-olds now have cell phones.
• 72% of all teens (88% of teen cell users) use text messaging.
• 54% of all teens text daily.  This compares to:
  • 38% who make a call on their cell (mostly with parents, they report)
  • 33% who talk face-to-face
  • 30% who talk on a landline
  • 25% who visit a social networking site
  • 24% who IM
  • 11% who email
• Boys send/receive 30 texts a day whereas girls send/receive 80.

One of the key implications here is how many more teens text daily than engage with a social media website.  Mobility is critical.

Here’s where I get blown away:

• Half of teens send 50+ text messages a day.
• Roughly one-third of teens send more than 100 text messages a day (3,000 a month).
• 15% of teens who text (or 11% of all teens) send more than 200 texts a day (6,000 a month).  Let’s be generous and say that to send/receive a text takes 15 seconds.  That’s nearly an hour a day these heavy users spend texting.

Reading between the lines, the instant gratification of communication via this channel says something important about these teens.

(To see the full report, visit Pew Research.)

Question 1:  I wonder how this will impact business communications 10 years from now.

Question 2: How does this/should this impact how research is conducted with this hard-to-reach target?