very basic Facebook stats on 4 African countries

In this article we focus on Facebook users in 4 African countries, Egypt, South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.  The analysis is very basic but we hope that you will get some value from it. We only analyse total membership and the split between men and women.  We do not look at the ages makeup. The information used was sourced from Facebook on 21 January 2011 and the figures.

There are 5,095,080 Facebook users in Egypt

There are 3,428,660Facebook users in South Africa.

There are 2,777,440 Facebook users in Nigeria

There are 999,700   Facebook users in Kenya

These countries have been randomly chosen. Perhaps there are roughly representative of Northern, Southern, Eastern and Western Africa.

In Egypt of the Facebook users 3,147,480 are men and 1,829,800 are women.

In South Africa of the Facebook users 1,636,220 are men and 1,727,740 are women.

In Nigeria of the Facebook users, 1,857,120 are men and 898,160 are women

In Kenya of the Facebook  users  621,080 are men and 367,400 are women

Here are some observations from this data. Of the 4 countries, South Africa is the only one with more women and than men using Facebook.  Egypt, Nigeria and Kenya have far more men using Facebook than women. Why is the case in South Africa?  How is internet usage and social media awareness in South Africa? These are just questions we pose. We  don’t have the answers.

Regarding South Africa and Egypt we saw in our earlier post (http://www.chessplains.com/2011/01/19/linkedin-statistics-as-at-19-january-2011/) that South Africa had far LinkedIn users than Egypt, just over 1 million users for South Africa versus just under 300,000 users for Egypt.

Far more people are using Facebook in both South Africa and Egypt than LinkedIn. We already know that globally Facebook has over 600 million users compared to LinkedIn’s 98 million users so perhaps there is little surprise at country level.

It would be interesting to see how Facebook and LinkedIn statistics in the African countries compares with other statistics such as total population or economically active population.  I expect that with the internet and mobile boom in Africa, countries like Kenya will continue to increase Facebook and LinkedIn users. Internet bandwidths and speed continues to improve in Africa while costs are coming down. All things being equal, this bodes well for LinkedIn and Facebook.

If you would like more detail on the make-up of the figures such as breakdown of the ages please let us know. You find us on Facebook on http://www.facebook.com/ChessPlainsCoaching