At an event in Cape Town in November 2011, Google shared the results of its study about South African smartphone users’ most popular social networking sites. It is a fact that smartphones and mobile devices are the primary means of accessing the internet in South Africa, and social media forms a large part of internet activity with e-mail, news and banking following close behind.

More than 1000 smartphone users were surveyed about their social network usage and asked which social media sites they accessed on their phone and which they accessed via their computer. 95% voted Facebook first as the site most accessed on their smartphone and personal computer, with Twitter and MySpace taking second and third positions.

Another study titled “South African Social Media Landscape 2011” by World Wide Worx, one of South Africa’s technology research companies showed the following:

• MXit is SA’s most popular social network with 10 million users
• Twitter has 1.1 million
• Facebook has 3.2 million
• LinkedIn has 1.1 million

Although many surveys have shown the BlackBerry Messenger as a popular platform in SA, it did not feature conspicuously in either study. A possible reason for this could be that BlackBerry is not seen as a social network service. In any case, Facebook was on top with Twitter second. Both MXit and Facebook have the maximum number of users while Twitter usage has grown significantly during 2011, showing a 20 times growth in a year. In the second half of 2011, BlackBerry Messenger was the fastest growing network.

Twitter and Facebook are the most leveraged social media sites by celebrities to engage their fans and followers. Even though not everyone on Twitter is active, most stand in the sidelines and watch, follow or use it to convey news.

MXit has more than ten million active users, with over seventy percent of the users eighteen years and above. Facebook has 4.2 million users, but, of these, only 3.2 actually visited the website in 2011. This is probably because the shine of a new network wore off, with most teenagers preferring to use BlackBerry Messenger over Facebook. Here is a look at the user profile of SA from Facebook (according to World Wide Worx):

• 2 million males and 2.2 million females
• 1.15 million university graduates
• 68,000 still in university
• Users are in the 23-36 year old age group
• 1.9m users in Johannesburg
• 900,000 users in Cape Town

LinkedIn, with 1.1 million users in South Africa saw over 80% of its growth during 2010 and 2011 of which ten percent are business owners.

The trend shows that younger users tend to be more active on social networks. However, as interaction with social networks becomes the norm and as MXit, Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger statistics show, there will be a healthy mix of all age groups accessing these sites to interact with each other.

Naturally, marketers are also taking advantage of the global reach of social media by engaging their users in creative ways. This is economical both for the marketer as well as the social media user since it is significantly cheaper than traditional means of communication.  Social media also makes it easy to receive and share information in real time, encouraging comments, shares and likes, making it easy for the marketer to track the success of any promotional campaign.