Africa is one of the least dominant regions to have adopted the social networking giant Facebook as the preferred platform.
Socialbakers, a social media analytics company, released a recent report that shows, with about 41.5 million Facebook users, Africa is the second last continent ahead of Australia, which is indicated to have nearly 14 million users
Europe is leading with over 234.7 million users followed by North America with about 225 million. Asia almost ties with Europe with about 224 million. South America has 121.5 million users.
With an estimated 11 million users, Egypt has the largest number of Facebook users in Africa. This is “way below” Brazil’s 20 million new users in a record eight months. Brazil also remains the country with the world’s largest number of new users adopting social networking sites in the last one year.
The report also indicates Latin America as the fastest growing continent on Facebook — a growth attributed to Brazil’s record high new users.
South Africa is second with about 4.7 million users. Nigeria, the country with the highest number of phone users and Internet-enabled phones, comes third with about 4.6 million users. Morocco has 4.3 million users, Algeria 3.4 million, Tunisia 3 million while Kenya comes seventh with about 1.4 million. Ghana follows Kenya with an estimated 1.2 million registered users.
São Tomé and Príncipe featured as the country with the least number of Facebook users in Africa with about 6,000 users.
Ethiopia, where the government banned VOiP (voice over internet protocol) earlier this month, is placed eleventh with about 570,000 users.
Compared to other continents, nations in South America have helped trigger the exponential growth for social networking with countries including Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela showing increased Facebook user base, according to the report.
Even though the South American continent trails Europe, North America and Asia, the report shows it has been doubling its Facebook population.
Although remaining the fourth biggest continent, South America has been the fastest growing continent by almost doubling its Facebook population over the past 1.5 years.
Facebook’s penetration in the South American nation of Brazil is a startling feat. The country has shown vigilance in using the social networks favouring sites including Google’s Orkut social networking site. The numbers, according to the report, are however starting to move in favor of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook.
“Brazil, as Facebook country number 7 is leading the rank in terms of its users’ growth especially in the country where Google’s Orkut is still the most popular social media site. Brazil is also the fourth largest LinkedIn country with over 6 million professional users,” Socialbakers said.
ComScore, analytics company headquartered in Reston, VA., in the data it provided, showed visitors ages 15 years and over accessed Facebook frequently from work and at home.
According to comScore, on average, an Orkut visitor spent 96.6 minutes while Facebook’s spent 451 minutes. This indicates that a Facebook user would spend about three times more time in social networking than an Orkut user.
The reports from Socialbakers and comScore also measured different online behaviors.
A number of analyses indicate Asia as another continent with the highest social networking potential. According to Socialbakers, Asia grew by 53 percent in the same period as South America. More specifically Indonesia, India and the Philippines are growing their Facebook population fast.
Facebook.com is also the second most used website, after Google.com, according to an analytic website Alexa.com. It has the largest aggregation of users estimated to be 900 million.
Launched in 2004, it has grown terrifically over the last eight years reaching a monetary valuation of over $50 billion.
