By John Mokwetsi
I stumbled upon a report entitled How Africa Tweets by Portland Communications and Tweetminster that analysed over 11.5 million geo-located Tweets originating on the continent during the last three months of 2011.
According to the report following a survey of 500 of Africa’s most active Tweeters, 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.
In Southern Africa, countries like Namibia and Angola have some minimal active tweeting community and countries like Malawi, Tanzania, Botswana and Zimbabwe are not mentioned showing an apathy in the use of the this online social networking service and microblogging service.
Encouraging though is the fact that 60% of Africa’s most active Tweeters are aged 20-29 itself the generation that needs to be engaged in national discourse as potential future leaders.
The disappointing factor is that the report reveals that twitter in Africa is widely used for social conversation, with 81% of those polled saying that they mainly used it for communicating with friends leaving me wondering if the golden generation is engaging in nation building issues.
All is not lost though as the same report makes a case that 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.
But what about opinion maker, our leaders, whose proximity to the grassroots is only from the bullet proof top of the range cars where they wave uncontrollably to bemused people in all forms of tattered clothes waving back?
Mark Flanagan, Portland’s Partner for Digital Communications, says: “One of the more surprising findings of this research is that more public figures have not joined Africa’s burgeoning Twittersphere. With some notable exceptions, 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.”
PM Morgan Tsvangirai with a following of only 1436, maybe a reflection of Twitter apathy in Zimbabwe, has only tweeted 20 times in three months.
Well maybe Beatrice Karanja, Associate Director and head of Portland Nairobi,articulates it better when she says: “We saw the pivotal role of Twitter in the events in North Africa last year, but it is clear that Africa’s Twitter revolution is really just beginning.”
