A report title ‘SA Social Media Landscape 2014’ from World Wide Worx and Fuseware said that Facebook in now the in thing in South Africa.
Previously Mxit was the leading with 9.5million active users in South Africa, it now has 7.4million users, says the researchers of the report. Facebook has now taken the lead and is the in thing in the country, as it currently has 9.4 million active users, up from 6.8million users last year.
Mxit has been lagging behind and even more since the emergence of instant texting services such as whatsApp and 2Go.
The communications president at Mxit, Sarah Rice, has said that Mxit’s decision to change its reporting procedure for measuring users has led to the significant dip indicated by World Wide Worx and Fuseware.
“The numbers are correct but I will tell you the reason for that,” she said. “At the beginning of the year Mxit changed its methodology to measure users over a 90 day period to 30 days, this resulted in the drop in our numbers,” she explained.
She added that if they ration their numbers over 90 days they would have more than 90 million users and that would be stable enough for them.
Other findings that are to be released suggested that Twitter saw the highest percentage growth among social networks in South Africa, as it has grown from 2.4 million users to 5.5 million from 2012, representing a growth of 129%.
Other networks like, Google+ is still yet to move from its position in the country, it currently has only 466 000 active users stated the researchers.
“The most significant finding, aside from the growth itself, was the extent to which social networks are being used on phones in South Africa,” said Arthur Goldstuck, managing director of World Wide Worx. “No less than 87 percent of Facebook users and 85 percent of Twitter users are accessing these tools on their phones,” he said.