How Africa’s Young Mobile Users Are Driving Twitter Growth in Africa

Submitted by Saskia Harmsen on Thursday, 26th January, 2012 — Blog entry

image credit: TechLoy

A new research on How Africa Tweets released today by Portland shows how young people tweeting from mobile devices are driving the growth of Twitter in Africa.

In collaboration with Tweetminster, this comprehensive map on the use of Twitter in Africa, analysed over 11.5 million geo-located tweets originating on the continent during the last three months of 2011. It was also complemented by a survey of 500 of Africa’s most active Tweeters.

According to the research:

South Africa is the continent’s most active country by volume of geo-located Tweets, with over twice as many Tweets (5,030,226 during Q4 2011) as the next most active Kenya (2,476,800). Nigeria (1,646,212), Egypt (1,214,062) and Morocco (745,620) make up the remainder of the top five most active countries.
57% of Tweets from Africa are sent from mobile devices.
60% of Africa’s most active Tweeters are aged 20-29.
Twitter in Africa is widely used for social conversation, with 81% of those polled saying that they mainly used it for communicating with friends.
Twitter is becoming an important source of information in Africa. 68% of those polled said that they use Twitter to monitor news. 22% use it to search for employment opportunities.
African Twitter users are active across a range of social media, including Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn.

The research findings reveal that more public figures have not joined Africa’s burgeoning Twittersphere, although with some notable exceptions.

According to Mark Flanagan, Portland’s Partner for Digital Communications:

“We found that business and political leaders were largely absent from the debates playing out on Twitter across the continent. As Twitter lifts off in Africa, governments, businesses and development agencies can really no longer afford to stay out of a new space where dialogue will increasingly be taking place.”

The survey also found that Twitter is helping to form new links within Africa and the majority of those surveyed said that at least half of the Twitter accounts they follow are based on the continent.

The infographic below shows a comprehensive map on the use of Twitter in Africa.

source: http://techloy.com/2012/01/26/how-africa-tweets-infographic/