Africa is Slowly but Steadily Adding Facebook Users
Today we’re taking a look at Africa’s growth on Facebook, drawn from our Global Monitor statistics for February. Africa is by far the world’s smallest region in terms of its total number of Facebook users, coming in almost even with the Arabian Peninsula despite a huge disparity in total population.
Below we’ve listed the only six countries on the whole continent that are growing significantly. As you can see, the top two are both in northern Africa, part of the culturally-interrelated Maghreb region (we’ve exempted Egypt).
Despite having higher growth and a few more users than Tunisia, Morocco has less than half the penetration — only 4.4 percent of its internet users are on Facebook. Long-term, it seems like these two could grow into significant markets. Their huge neighbors, Algeria and Libya, don’t have many internet users and aren’t tracked by Facebook at all (we draw these stats from its advertising tool).
The third-fastest grower in sub-Saharan Africa is Nigeria. This country’s Facebook user base is growing slowly. What you can’t see here is that its penetration is about as low as it gets, at 0.7 percent. Ghana and Kenya aren’t much better off, while South Africa has about 5 percent of its internet users online — no doubt advantaged by the country’s many English speakers.
It’s easy to blame the relatively limited internet access in Africa for its slow growth, but from the low penetration even among internet users we can see that there’s more to the story. Language is likely one problem; Facebook isn’t likely to get translated into hundreds of African regional dialects any time soon.
The continent also tends to have more mobile users, who might not have an easy time using Facebook. But this could be changing, and driving more growth in the future. Facebook has been pushing out many new mobile features intended to help more people access the site more often. And, in December, Opera reported that Facebook is the most popular service accessed through its Mini mobile browser.
Here are all six:
Taken as a whole, Africa has only 2.6 percent penetration on Facebook, but grew 5.6 percent in February. As of March 1st, it had about 9.9 million users on Facebook, out of a total population of 375 million. The data above, by the way, all comes from our in-depth Global Monitor report, which provides 164 pages of growth statistics and forward projections for 98 countries and five world regions.
March 18th, 2010 at 5:41 pm
You might want to check your stats again. Local surveys show that 79% of Kenya’s Internet users are members of Facebook, and even you say its growing by 10% per month in Ghana. I’d not be calling either number a “slow” adoption.
March 19th, 2010 at 10:27 am
“South Africa has about 5 percent of its internet users online — no doubt advantaged by the country’s many English speakers.”
Nigeria and Ghana both use English as their official language, while Kenya’s official languages are English and Kiswahili. While about 29 percent of South Africans are English speakers, 53 percent of Nigerians are.
“Facebook isn’t likely to get translated into hundreds of African regional dialects any time soon.”
It’s been translated into Kiswahili (90 million speakers) and Afrikaans (10 million speakers).
March 19th, 2010 at 5:18 pm
Wayan: Thanks; we get our stats from Facebook’s advertising tool, so I’d imagine local polls would produce significantly different measurements. Still, I’d imagine that the folks at Facebook would realize it if the vast majority of Kenya’s internet users were on the network.
The 10% growth we’re showing for Ghana is from a pretty low starting point. Total growth is slow in comparison to other countries, although obviously that judgment is skewed a bit by Facebook’s overall size.
Kelly: Thanks; I was under the impression from my visit to South Africa that more people spoke English, but I spent more time in urban centers.
I do think FB will be translated into most languages eventually, but since we’re on the topic, SA alone has something like 13 national languages, no? It will take a while to cover all the various languages.
Anyway, you guys do have more perspective than I, so please email me if you want to talk it over a bit. I’ll be doing another of these posts in a month.
May 20th, 2010 at 11:02 pm
[...] enough, the 5 of the 6 largest Facebook using countries in Africa do not have access to this service yet: Morocco, Nigeria, South [...]
June 29th, 2010 at 7:36 am
[...] be blunt: barring some strange vagary, Facebook Zero is going to be a hit. Facebook is already popular in Africa, and in other developing countries, such as Indonesia, we know that usage is overwhelmingly through [...]
November 12th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
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March 25th, 2011 at 7:16 am
[...] South Africa is far ahead of the rest of the continent in terms of usage (Egypt excepted), but some other countries are catching up fast—very fast. Ghana’s number of FaceBook users grew by 9.6% from February to March 2010! Morocco (7.6%) Tunisia (7.7), Nigeria (6%), Kenya (2.4%). As internet penetration increases these numbers are likely to increase dramatically. Find all the data here. [...]