Whether you use your iPhone primarily for work or personal business, you will eventually build up a contact list. Occasionally one of your contacts will need to contact another one of your contacts, and you might elect to simply find that person’s phone number and copy and paste it into a text message.
But your iPhone has built-in functionality that allows you to send the full contact information stored on your device to another person via text message. This information is sent as a vcard, and the recipient can simply tap the contact button that you send and add that person as a contact.
Send a Contact Through Messages on the iPhone
These steps were performed on an iPhone 5, in iOS 8. The method is similar in earlier versions of iOS, but the screens in the images below may look different.
You can visit Apple’s support site here to learn more about iCloud contacts.
Step 1: Open the Phone app.

Step 2: Select the Contacts option at the bottom of the screen.

Step 3: Select the contact that you want to share via message.
Step 4: Scroll to the bottom of the contact and select the Share Contact option.

Step 5: Tap the Message option.

Step 6: Enter the phone number or name of the person with whom you want to share the contact into the To field at the top of the screen, then touch the Send button.

Have you ever wondered why some of your text messages are green and some are blue? Read here to learn why this happens, and what the difference is between the two types of messages.
Matthew Burleigh has been writing tech tutorials since 2008. His writing has appeared on dozens of different websites and been read over 50 million times.
After receiving his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science he spent several years working in IT management for small businesses. However, he now works full time writing content online and creating websites.
His main writing topics include iPhones, Microsoft Office, Google Apps, Android, and Photoshop, but he has also written about many other tech topics as well.
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