What is a Keyword?
This is one of the most commonly asked questions that people seem to have the biggest
trouble with. We think we have a perfect way to help you understand how this works.
When you sign up for an email account with, lets say, Google, you pick a username
and it might look something like this:
Kathy@google.com
Right? Well, Google owns google.com (obviously!) and they allow you to use their
website to send and receive emails. There are millions of people that use Google,
so they need a way to route your emails to your account. That's why they have you
select a username. If you just sent an email to google.com
without putting a name in front, then the message would just go
to Google and we're sure they don't want your emails. At least we hope they don't...
This is exactly how ExpressText works. We own the text message number
545454 and we allow you to use it. It works great for
sending out text messages, just like google.com
works great for sending out emails. But what happens when you want people
to respond to your message?
Well, you need a keyword that will
route that message to your account. If you don't, then people will send messages
to 545454 and because we own it, the
messages will come to us. We don't want your text messages either. So in order to
solve this problem, all you do is set up a keyword and now people can send text
messages directly to your account!
You might put something that looks like this on your website:
Text Kathy to 545454
Now, anyone who wants to send a message to Kathy can do so directly to her account.
Just like email, there are a lot more things you can do like create auto response
messages and conduct voting polls, but we just want to make sure you get the basics.