With 11 million South Africans logging onto Facebook each month, the popular social media site has the potential to double its local base in the next few years, as smartphone and feature phone penetration deepens.
This is the view of World Wide Worx MD Arthur Goldstuck, who was commenting on recent research by Ipsos. According to the findings of the Ipsos study, 10 million South Africans connect to Facebook through their cellphones.
Globally, Facebook has 1.28 billion monthly active users, of which 1.01 billion access the site through their phones. Around 802 million people use the site daily, of which 609 million do so through a mobile device.
In South Africa, 6.7 million people log on each day, with 6.2 million of these connections coming from handheld devices. Goldstuck says, as there are only 16 million smartphones in SA, the social networking site still has room to grow.
Goldstuck notes that smartphones are the prime market for Facebook, and it can also be accessed through feature phones, which offer great potential for the service to grow.
Waking moments
Ipsos, which surveyed 500 people between November and December last year, says South Africans who use Facebook are "deeply engaged with the service from the moment they wake up to when they go to sleep at night".
Among those surveyed, 40% check Facebook before getting out of bed and 36% log on just before going to sleep. The study also found that Facebook is widely used (80%) for 'second screen' activity while watching television.
Most South Africans - at 92% - who use Facebook do so during TV primetime hours, which are between 5pm and 9pm. Facebook's director for the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa region, Diego Oliva, says the site's growth has largely been due to the growth of mobile devices.
"In many ways, South Africa and other African countries are further ahead than Europe and the US when it comes to this shift to mobile. They have effectively skipped the era of desktop computing."
Goldstuck notes that while Ipsos' sample size is small, leaving a 7% margin for error, the numbers correlate closely with World Wide Worx's latest study into the local social media landscape.
The infographic can be accessed here.
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