Chapter 22 GSMM-South Africa Kenya Nigeria

7/27/2019 Chapter 22 GSMM-South Africa Kenya Nigeria

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Overview

Internet penetration for South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria are represented through thefigure below. As we can see here internet penetration in all these countries is very low.However considering these are African countries, a penetration rate above 25% is

equivalent to a penetration rate of 50% in Europe or North America.

While the internet penetration rate is low, Kenya and Nigeria still fall in the top 10African countries in terms of internet penetration. The figure represents that list.

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Internet penetration in Nigeria

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Internet penetration in South Africa

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Internet penetration in Kenya



Even though we see Kenya and Nigeria at the 9th and 10th position respectively, we needto take into account the population of these countries to get a clearer picture. If Kenyaand Nigeria are taken off the list, the remaining countries together account for only30.7% of the African population. Kenya alone accounts for 28.9% of the total African population. The figure below represents the population of the countries with highest

internet penetration and the comparison of this figure with the figure above will give us aclearer picture.

This is why it is important to access the African countries in terms of number of internetusers rather than penetration of internet in the population. The figure below represents thetop 5 countries in terms of internet users.

South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria all fall in the top 5 countries in terms of internet population and are therefore an important digital market in Africa.



Nigeria has made sound progress in terms of internet since 1999 when it came out of amilitary regime to an elected government system. The population of internet users hasgrown from a mere 200,000 in 2000 to 11 million in 2008 to almost 50 million people in2012. One of the factors that have also helped Nigerian internet landscape is the mobileinternet services and wireless services. The data services in Nigeria have gone cheaper.

The average charge for 1 MB data is $ 1 compared to $7 in 2010.

Mobile phone penetration is 58.6% out of which there were 7.3 million mobile internetusers. Blackberry in particular is doing well in Nigeria and the number of Blackberryusers is estimated to reach 500,000 in October 2011. Further growth is expected in themobile internet landscape as 3G services grow strong in the area.

Similar is the case in South Africa, where the number of internet users on mobile exceedsthose who own a computer. There are 15.7 million mobile internet users compared to 6.4million computer owners. The use of mobile phones had grown from 17% in 2000 to76% in 2010.

According to a 2011 report by Neilsonwire mobile phones usage has increaseddramatically in South Africa. The figure below illustrates the importance of mobile inSouth Africa.

Nokia is the dominant player in South Africa accounting for more than half the handsetsin the country.

The major activities on mobile phones is shown through the figure given below.



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Go online

Download ringtones

Text messaging

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As we can see here that text messaging and using social networks are the two major activities on mobile internet. The use of Facebook is what drives the use of social

networks in mobile internet. Text messaging is used more than 4 times compared to theuse of e-mails.

The figure below represents the demographic profile of South African internet users.

The youngest group accounts for more than one third of the total internet users in SouthAfrica. Internet users falling under the age group of 15-34 account for approximatelythree-fourths of the total internet population. As per South African Network Society(SANSS) female users account for 46% of the total internet users which shows that thegender gap is closing.

While internet use is still considered expensive in South Africa, the number of users havenevertheless have doubled in the last four years.

Overall, internet access in South Africa is low and a lot of work is required. According toa report by Statistics South Africa, more than 60% of the households has no access tointernet. The figure below represents the findings the study in terms of internet access.



As we see here again, that only 8.6% of the people in South Africa have access to internetat home, while most access internet through their mobile phones (16.3%). In total only35.2% have access to internet in South Africa.



Social Media

Social media in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria is growing at a rapid pace. However,there are limitations to the growth such as limited internet availability, cost of usinginternet and similar others. Lack of infrastructure means that Social Media growth is

constrained.

Currently, 1.6 million Kenyans are using Facebook and Twitter. In 2011, over 2 milliontweets were generated in Kenya which gets it adjacent to South Africa, the most activecountry on social media in the African continent.

Despite these numbers, using social media in Kenya is seen as a luxury. Some of theobstacles are costs associated with Internet, unreliable electricity and inadequate access tointernet access devices such as PC or smartphones. In fact, the costs associated withinternet are so great for Kenyans that using the internet for approximately 30 minutes isalmost equal to an average Kenyan feeding his family for a couple of days. The total cost

of using the internet at a café, creating an e-mail account and scanning/creating/uploadinga photo on social networking sites such as Facebook costs somewhere around $ 0.72which is enough to buy maize porridge to feed a family for a few days.

Apart from the costs, travel is also a part of using internet to access social networkingsites. Rural Kenya has hardly any place where internet can be accessed. This fact isfurther strengthened by the fact that almost all blogs, Facebook account or twitter accountare based around Nairobi. Moreover the activist blogs which are present are mostlyorganizational and few individuals maintain a blog.

Like most developing countries where internet infrastructure is less developed, it’s themobiles that serve as the internet access devices. Kenya with a population of 40 has over 29 million mobile users. Add that to the fact that most of the Kenyans are under the ageof 20, it gives you a young eager set of people who are open to experiment withtechnologies as they come.

In fact, mobile has already started participating in the daily life of Kenyans. Kenyans usea mobile money transfer solution called M-PESA. This is supported by Safaricom andallows for making payments and receipt of payments among the users. There is no needfor internet, or a third party application or even SMS. While Smartphones are not prevalent in Kenya,

There are indications that women, who are mostly the more active gender on socialnetworks in most countries developed or developing, are underrepresented here.

Having discussed the problems associated with social media in Kenya, one should notundermine the importance it has gained here. Social media is a new form of communication which has proven its benefits to Kenyans over the years. In a recent strike



by Doctors of Kenya for increasing their salary, they used social media as a platform todemonstrate and argue their case with the government. When the then present MPs usedthe opportunity to scam and create heavy pensions for themselves, Facebook and blogsserved as the means for people to urge the President to take action. Demonstrations wereorganized through the help of Twitter. Social media helped resolve the situation with

President rejecting the bill.

This is not a standalone case by any means in Kenya. A village chief of Lanet, Kenyauses twitter and Facebook updates to update people with important information. He goesa step ahead by teaching people of the advantages of social networks.

Overall, Kenyans may not have great access to internet and social media, but whatever access is available they are making full use of it. In the coming years with further growthin the infrastructure of internet and increase in use of smartphones, Kenya will be readyto join the social world.

With the highest internet population in Africa, Nigeria also claims the right to boast of the most number of social media users. The use of social media has topped the use of e-mails according to a recent study done by Eskimi in Nigeria. The study which focused onuse of e-mails revealed social media as the major source of communication with 41% of the survey respondents saying that social media was more important than e-mail. Chatmessengers and SMS were also identified as an important form of communicationclaiming 38% of the respondents.

Social media in Nigeria is almost synonymous with Facebook and Twitter. While internetinfrastructure is still in its nascent phase in Nigeria, Nigerian social media users haveturned to mobile to access the social networking sites. 87.2% of the Nigerian social mediausers use a mobile device to access Facebook, which makes it the second largest population accessing Facebook via mobile in the world. In twitter, it produced 1,646,212tweets in a 3 month period, ranking third among countries on the African continent interms of number of tweets generated.

Overall, more than half of the Nigerian social media users access social networking sitesvia mobile. The infographic given below summarises the use and prevalence of socialmedia in Nigeria.



Apart from Facebook, Google+ has also been making waves in the African continent, andin Nigeria. A recent study by PluDemographics revealed the age and gender demographics for Facebook and Google+ users in Nigeria.

The figure below compares the demographics of both these platforms in Nigeria. As wecan see here, Google+ is dominated mainly by male users with 84.7% of total users.

Similarly in age groups, Google+ gets more than half of its users from the 18-24 agegroup. Facebook on the other hand has a more even spread of users in different agegroups with 36% falling in the 18-24 age category and 35% falling in the 25-34 agecategory. These estimates could serve as a base for estimating the gender profile of socialmedia users in Nigeria across all social networking sites.



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South Africa is another major country in the African continent when social media isconcerned. The following infographic gives us an insight into social media habits of

South African users.

The top 5 reasons to go online put social media as the second most popular activity on theinternet after information search. Given below is a part of infographics made by NielsonOnline, which gives is the most popular social networks accessed via mobile phones.



The age and gender demographics of the social media population of South Africa aredisplayed through the figure below.

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As we can see here, the social media penetration among South African internet users isapproximately 86%. The penetration is high among young internet users falling in the agegroup 15-24 (92%) and 24-45 (92.5%). The penetration then decreases as we go up theage groups. With the exception of the youngest social media users, where the penetrationamong male users (99%) is higher than female users (85%), social media penetration ishigher among female internet users (84% in male users vs. 88% in female users).

The figure below gives us the time spent on social networks by people from different agegroups.

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As is generally seen, the youngest social media users i.e. age group 15-24 (2.7 hours)spend considerably more time on social networks than others. However, it is noteworthythat time spent on social networks does not gradually decrease as we go up in the agecategories, but rather it fluctuates. Time spent decreases as we move from age group 25-34 (1.9 hours) to the age group 35-44 (1.7 hours), but then rises again to 2 hours in the



age group 45-54. In fact the age group 35-44 represents the least time spent on socialnetworks. This is in line with the numbers which we have seen earlier when comparingusers of Facebook with Google+. Both these networks have the age group 35-44contributing the least number of their users (10%).

The major social networking sites in South Africa in terms of number of unique visitorsare given in the figure below.

- 1,000,000 2,000,000 3,000,000 4,000,000 5,000,000

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Facebook leading the social networking sites is something we have observed in mostcountries. Similar is the case here in South Africa, where Facebook has more than 4million unique visitors and the second most popular social networking site LinkedIn hasless than a million unique visitors. Twitter comes in third with almost half a millionusers, though that may change quickly. Twitter has been recognized as an importantsource of communication, not just with friends but also with public institutions.

In the following figure where time spent on the top 5 social networking sites isrepresented, we have not considered Facebook because the time spent on Facebook dwarfs the time spent on other social networking sites. So a better picture is formed when

the remaining social networking sites in South Africa are analyzed without Facebook.

As we can see here, that while MySpace ranks 4th in the list of top social networkingsites, the time spent on MySpace is far less than any other site (0.9 minutes). ConsideringMySpace hasn’t been growing in any country that we have observed so far, it will be safeto conclude that the only reason MySpace makes that list is due to it being a very old player in the social networking market, though it s most probably declining at this stage.

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Facebook

Facebook is the dominant platform in Africa. The following table gives us a summary of Facebook’s performance in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria.

CountryTotal Number of users

% penetration amonginternet users

World Rankin Facebook

South Africa 5515460 89.44% 33

Nigeria 5308560 11.77% 36

Kenya 2018560 19.24% 66

The following figures represent the growth curve of Facebook in terms of number of users in the period from May 2012 to May 2013.

Facebook growth in South Africa

Facebook growth in Nigeria



Facebook growth in Kenya

What we can observe from here is that Facebook grew smoothly in 2012 with slightdecline in the last quarter. Although it made up for the last quarter, the numbers of usershave since declined in South Africa and Nigeria in 2013. Kenya also showed somedecline but not as prominent as South Africa or Nigeria and has already picked up post

march 2013. In South Africa and Nigeria also the decline has slowed down after March2013 and it is relatively stable in April 2013.

Below are the age demographics of Facebook users in South Africa and Kenya. As wecan see here that the younger users form the bulk of Facebook users. The younger groupaccounts for the majority of Facebook users slightly more in case of Kenya than SouthAfrica. Nevertheless the age distribution clearly marks the dominance of young Kenyansand South Africans on Facebook.

Nigeria also has shown tremendous growth in Facebook. The figure below displays thegrowth of Facebook in Nigeria over the years.



Nigeria ranked as the 15th fastest growing country on Facebook in August 2011.According to InternetWorldStats, it ranked 2nd in terms of number of users in Africa,second only to Egypt.

Twitter

South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria are the most active African country on Twitter as per areport by Portland group. They created 5,030,226, 2,476,800 and 1,646,212 tweetsrespectively in a span of 3 months in the fourth quarter of 2011.

South Africa is the most active twitter country in the African continent. It generatedalmost double the number of tweets than second placed Kenya. This is possibly becausetwitter is more Smartphone based social networking site and South Africans have a better Smartphone usage rate than Nigeria or Kenya. It is estimated that 20% of South Africansnow own a Smartphone. 33% of mobile users access the internet and 21% of the users in

age group 18-29 own a Smartphone. 57%of the tweets generated came from cell phones.Most of the users of Twitter (60%) in South Africa are in their 20’s and major use of twitter is for conversing with friends.

Twitter in Nigeria is not as widespread as South Africa. It is possibly because of lowsocial media awareness. Almost all twitter users in Nigeria are Facebook users but that isnot the case other way around. Most twitter users are not first time social media users.People generally start using Facebook and then once awareness increases they move totwitter. However it has been observed in Nigeria that once a user moves to twitter, theattachment towards Facebook decreases. Many twitter users describe Facebook as boringor dull.

Twitter is mostly seen as an information source. It is also used in conjunction withFacebook to mobilize and organize demonstrations such as the one during the fuelsubsidy case. Another use of twitter is to seek employment. Job seekers actively look for employment opportunities on twitter.



Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring tools for Africa are still underdeveloped. Although there areagencies which provide such services, the services are still limited and few in number.However, since most users use global social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter,

LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and similar, international tools aimed at these platformswhich can provide language support can suffice the major requirements.

Some of the social media monitoring tools are

African Laughter: This Kenyan company also provides a social media monitoring toolcalled the Repute Daily Report. This tool will enable users to monitor social media andsocial media comments on any clients that are in the database.

It creates a detailed report of the social media activity. Some of the things that will betaken into account are sentiment analysis positive to negative ratio, alerts informing the

brand or client to any news headline as well as Facebook and Twitter monitoring. It alsoreports a Facebook to Twitter ratio.

Brands Eye: Brands Eye provides language support and can be used to monitor all platforms across Africa.

Sysomos: Sysomos is another social media company which provides monitoring toolssuch as Heartbeat. This is one of the better social media monitoring tools present in themarket.

Tips for Social Media Monitoring

African social media landscape is still underdeveloped in terms of infrastructure.However, the use of social media as an information and connection platform is as activeas most countries. In order to make good use of social media in South Africa, Nigeria andKenya, the following should be kept under consideration.

• Similar to most developing countries African internet infrastructure still lags

behind other nations. Therefore mobile internet may play a more important role asit would penetrate faster than the broadband connections.

• Kenyans have demonstrated their ease of use of mobile applications with use of

MPAISA. This further enhances the importance of mobile in Africa. As soon as

the smartphone market gets bigger, social networking sites which are more mobilefriendly will be the first to gain attention.

• A particularly useful trend to consider is that the users which start using twitter

look at Facebook as a daily mailbox. Even though numbers would suggest almostall users of twitter are on Facebook, once African users move to twitter attentiontowards Facebook declines.



• Twitter serves as an important information platform in Africa for disseminating

important news across people. It is also used as a medium to organizedemonstrations and other activities in Africa.

• Even though Facebook is the largest social networking site in Africa, using it

costs in rural Africa. This means that time spent on Facebook is much less than

what it could potentially be once the internet infrastructure is improved on.• One good thing that comes to social markers from the current user demographics

is that the users are young and belong to the upper class of the African society. Socampaigns for brands on social networking sites especially Facebook will attract alot of attention from the right demographics.

References

The missing links on Kenya's social Media

http://www.cio.co.ke/blog/the-missing-links-on-kenya's-social-media

The essential social media for Kenyan journalistshttp://networkednews.org/?p=34

“Facebook is a Luxury”: Social Media Use in Rural Kenya

http://crowdresearch.org/blog/?p=4563

Mobile Phones, Internet and Social Media Use in Kenya

http://futurechallenges.org/local/mobile-phones-internet-and-social-media-

use-in-kenya/

How Social Media Adoption is Growing in Kenya

http://blog.brightwavemarketing.com/2012/05/how-social-media-adoption-is-

growing-in-kenya/

Kenya and Mobile Payments

http://blog.brightwavemarketing.com/2012/05/kenya-and-mobile/

Nigeria - Mobile Market - Overview, Statistics and Forecasts

http://www.budde.com.au/Research/Nigeria-Mobile-Market-Overview-

Statistics-and-Forecasts.html

Younger Consumers Account for Three-Quarters of South Africa's

Internet Users http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Younger-Consumers-Account-Three-Quarters-of-South-Africas-Internet-Users/1009690

Mobile Phones Dominate in South Africa

http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2011/mobile-phones-dominate-in-

south-africa.html


http://networkednews.org/?p=34


http://futurechallenges.org/local/mobile-phones-internet-and-social-media-use-in-kenya/


http://blog.brightwavemarketing.com/2012/05/how-social-media-adoption-is-growing-in-kenya/



http://www.budde.com.au/Research/Nigeria-Mobile-Market-Overview-Statistics-and-Forecasts.html


http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Younger-Consumers-Account-Three-Quarters-of-South-Africas-Internet-Users/1009690


http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2011/mobile-phones-dominate-in-south-africa.html


http://networkednews.org/?p=34
















South Africa’s internet penetration poor

http://www.moneyweb.co.za/moneyweb-technology-news/south-africas-

internet-penetration-poor--census

Communications Commission of Kenya

http://www.cck.go.ke/resc/downloads/Sector_statistics_for_Quarter_2_-_2012-2013.pdf

Social media use exceeds emails in Nigeria, Eskimi says

http://www.technologytimesng.com/social-media-use-exceeds-emails-in-

nigeria-eskimi-says/

Nigeria: Facebook Users Grew Nine Times More Than Google Plus in

Past Six Months http://techloy.com/2012/01/31/facebook-vs-googleplus-

nigeria/

Recent Report shows Over 5 Million Twitter Users In South Africa

http://www.2oceansvibe.com/2013/03/07/recent-report-shows-over-5-million-

twitter-users-in-south-africa/

Facebook, Twitter Growth Driven By Smartphones In South Africa

[STUDY] http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/south-africa-social-

media_b27585

SA Twitter Report 2010 Analysis and Demographics Of South

African Twitter Usage http://www.fuseware.net/wp-

content/uploads/2010/04/SA-Twitter-Report-2010.pdf

http://www.moneyweb.co.za/moneyweb-technology-news/south-africas-internet-penetration-poor--census




http://www.technologytimesng.com/social-media-use-exceeds-emails-in-nigeria-eskimi-says/


http://techloy.com/2012/01/31/facebook-vs-googleplus-nigeria/


http://www.2oceansvibe.com/2013/03/07/recent-report-shows-over-5-million-twitter-users-in-south-africa/


http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/south-africa-social-media_b27585


http://www.fuseware.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/SA-Twitter-Report-2010.pdf
















Chapter 22 GSMM-South Africa Kenya Nigeria

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