When you get the cell phone contact information from a potential customer, would you feel okay communicating with them via text? Have you ever asked? You might want to consider texting as a form of communicating with your customers. According to a recent survey, some 83% of American adults own cell phones and three-quarters of them (73%) send and receive text messages. The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project asked those texters in a survey how they prefer to be contacted on their cell phone and 31% said they preferred texts to talking on the phone, while 53% said they preferred a voice call to a text message. Another 14% said the contact method they prefer depends on the situation.

Young adults are the most avid texters by a wide margin. Cell owners between the ages of 18 and 24 exchange an average of 109.5 messages on a normal day — that works out to more than 3,200 texts per month — and the typical or median cell owner in this age group sends or receives 50 messages per day (or 1500 messages per month).

Read the full report at pewinternet.org for more background on how different demographic groups use texting.