Posted on February 18, 2008 - by Justin Hartman
South African Facebook Demographics
In November last year I did a presentation on Multimedia and Social Media to the RedCube PR agency and in it I looked at South Africa’s total registered users on Facebook as well as where we ranked against other countries in the world.
This was a very interesting exercise so I figured that it might be interesting to expand on this and explore the stats available on South Africa. I’ve now created the first of hopefully a monthly report and you can view the stats in greater detail below, download the PDF version or grab some high-resolution images to use as you see fit.
Because I only had some figures from November 2007 I was only able to do a comparison of the total registered users on Facebook but this will obviously be expanded somewhat next month.
What I did find interesting (even with the limited data) was that the growth rate of registered users on Facebook only grew by 41,680 people in a three month period.
I have no official stats but I know from watching the trends in the past that registered users from SA had been growing at a phenomenal rate and this current figure tells me there is a major slow-down and possibly even a saturation in users.
As a result we dropped from #9 to #10 in the world for registered users while Turkey and France nearly doubled their figures during this same period.
I hope that this information is of value to some of you and I’d love to hear some feedback, if possible.
I am the MD and co-founder of 
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February 18, 2008
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Great job Justin. I picked up on your slides late last night before you posted.
One thing I would like to discuss though is the ‘registered users’ statistics. We saw a drop between November, December and January and an increase in February. Those figures are actually active registered users over a 30 day period. So we might only have seen 2 000 new users and the rest were just purely in inactive due to the festive season. A lot people went back to work, university and school from mid January.
Great presentation though, what are you using to create your graphs?
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February 18, 2008
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Thanks for the clarity on this Tyler. Makes sense I guess
I’m using Keynote as the native graphing is just incredible.
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February 18, 2008
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[...] Hartman, New Media Strategist at The Times, has put together an amazing presentation on South Africa’s Facebook [...]
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February 18, 2008
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Great job Justin. I picked up on your slides late last night before you posted.
One thing I would like to discuss though is the 'registered users' statistics. We saw a drop between November, December and January and an increase in February. Those figures are actually active registered users over a 30 day period. So we might only have seen 2 000 new users and the rest were just purely in inactive due to the festive season. A lot people went back to work, university and school from mid January.
Great presentation though, what are you using to create your graphs?
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February 18, 2008
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Thanks for the clarity on this Tyler. Makes sense I guess
I'm using Keynote as the native graphing is just incredible.
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February 19, 2008
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[...] South African Facebook Demographics by Justin Hartman (tags: web20 facebookSA) [...]
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February 20, 2008
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Apple’s Keynote makes things look so good… Nice data here too Justin.
I wonder how fast SA will cap out on FB? How many potential FB users are there in SA anyway?
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February 20, 2008
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Apple's Keynote makes things look so good… Nice data here too Justin.
I wonder how fast SA will cap out on FB? How many potential FB users are there in SA anyway?
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February 20, 2008
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Does anyone have stats on ACTIVE USERS on Facebook in South Africa?
Many thanks
Eugene du Plessis
Channel Strategist
T 27 21 468 8075
F 27 21 468 8199
M 27 78 456 6784
eugene.duplessis@sa.24.com
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February 20, 2008
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Hi Eugene – as I understand it from Tyler’s comment these are active users in the last 30-days.
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February 20, 2008
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Hash, if you look at current, available Internet stats in SA then we’re dealing anywhere between 3.5 to 5 million users online (depending on where you look).
Of that how many will be FB users I have no idea but I’m not convinced this 700k figure will not increase beyond this much unless penetration increases.
I do stand to be corrected though
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February 20, 2008
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Does anyone have stats on ACTIVE USERS on Facebook in South Africa?
Many thanks
Eugene du Plessis
Channel Strategist
T 27 21 468 8075
F 27 21 468 8199
M 27 78 456 6784
eugene.duplessis@sa.24.com
Visit My Website
February 20, 2008
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Hi Eugene – as I understand it from Tyler's comment these are active users in the last 30-days.
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February 20, 2008
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Hash, if you look at current, available Internet stats in SA then we're dealing anywhere between 3.5 to 5 million users online (depending on where you look).
Of that how many will be FB users I have no idea but I'm not convinced this 700k figure will not increase beyond this much unless penetration increases.
I do stand to be corrected though
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February 28, 2008
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Hi,
interesting to see a detailed breakdown for South Africa. A question, when you do the gender breakdown – do you take into account the “unspecified” genders?
Have a look at http://thekillerattitude.com/2008/02/facebook-statistics-update.html for a global snapshot around the same period.
Also, if you are interested to compare SA to Sweden, I had a closer look at Sweden last year (http://thekillerattitude.com/2007/10/facebook-statistics-in-sweden.html)
Regards
/Johan
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February 29, 2008
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Hi Johan
Very nice, thorough set of stats you’ve compiled there. In the more detailed graphs I have I decided to omit the unspecified because I wasn’t sure how to handle them.
There is a fairly high percentage of users that don’t specify certain elements but I decided to report only on those users that actually did specify details. Maybe there is a case for this but I’m still undecided.
You and I should also look at combining our work together and releasing a definitive document each month on FB usage stats. I was going to look into expanding to other countries as well but seeing as you’re doing this already maybe we should explore a closer working relationship.
What do you think?
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February 28, 2008
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Hi,
interesting to see a detailed breakdown for South Africa. A question, when you do the gender breakdown – do you take into account the “unspecified” genders?
Have a look at http://thekillerattitude.com/2008/02/facebook-s... for a global snapshot around the same period.
Also, if you are interested to compare SA to Sweden, I had a closer look at Sweden last year (http://thekillerattitude.com/2007/10/facebook-s...)
Regards
/Johan
Visit My Website
February 29, 2008
Permalink
Hi Johan
Very nice, thorough set of stats you've compiled there. In the more detailed graphs I have I decided to omit the unspecified because I wasn't sure how to handle them.
There is a fairly high percentage of users that don't specify certain elements but I decided to report only on those users that actually did specify details. Maybe there is a case for this but I'm still undecided.
You and I should also look at combining our work together and releasing a definitive document each month on FB usage stats. I was going to look into expanding to other countries as well but seeing as you're doing this already maybe we should explore a closer working relationship.
What do you think?
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February 29, 2008
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Hi Justin,
sounds like an idea!
Looking into top level data is not that hard work, but if you’d like to do a deeper demographic breakdown for all countries a collective approach would definately help.
Drop me a line at johan [at] thekillerattitude . com
Regards
/Johan
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February 29, 2008
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Hi Justin,
sounds like an idea!
Looking into top level data is not that hard work, but if you'd like to do a deeper demographic breakdown for all countries a collective approach would definately help.
Drop me a line at johan [at] thekillerattitude . com
Regards
/Johan
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February 2, 2009
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[...] of the top users to social networking groups like facebook! In 2007 South Africa was one of the fastest growing countries using [...]
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June 14, 2009
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September 21, 2009
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