There's been some criticism of the recently released graphic that ranks the Top 20 African countries by twitter volume. The graphic was created from an analysis of 11.5 million geographically pinpointed tweets originating on the content in the last 3 months of 2011.
Much of the criticism is about context, specifically how this compares with America and Europe, how many tweets per head by country, and why, for instance, are more tweets generated in 2nd-placed Kenya (2.48 million tweets from a population of 41 million) than in 3rd-placed Nigeria (1.67 million Tweets from a population of 155 million)?
Valid questions. Location-tagging makes the figures robust, but it's probable that most people don't location-tag their tweets (we're not really sure what percentage of people currently location-tag, but we know that only 0.23% of global tweets were location-tagged one month after Twitter made it possible for people to do so, and that a year later the figure was still only 0.5%, according to analysis by the guy who built TweetStats; the function is disabled by default; if you want to enable it, check HERE), so it's possible (not probable, but possible), for instance, that more people tweet from Nigeria than South Africa, but that most Nigerian tweeters don't have geo-location enabled for whatever reason (perhaps they're less comfortable about divulging such information). Thus it would be useful to have the total number of tweets per country as well in order to read more into this. In the absence of this comparative data, it's hard to know how much credence to give the rankings.
The other caveat about location-tagging data is that if the percentages of Twitter users who don't enable the function holds true across the continent as well, then not only is this a partial picture, but the number of perple tweeting by country might be several times larger than the populations in this analysis. Another reason why it would be useful to have those totals.
To be fair to Portland Communications's Kenya office, who analysed the data and released the graphic, Twitter isn't very forthcoming when it comes to detailed user and usage data. They tend, instead, to release global totals, such as they did when total active users hit 100 million, with any "detail" being more useful for their PR than for any other purpose. So if Twitter doesn't release detailed information there isn't much anyone trying to learn more can do.
A representative from the consultancy also stated, in response to the criticism, that consistent data for number of users across Africa per country is not readily available, so they went for one easy-to-define metric: volume of geo-tagged tweets.
Still, this is better than anything we had before, and what it tells us is mostly good news. Findings include:
1. The average age of African tweeters is between 20 and 29 years old, whereas the worldwide average is 39 years old. It's worth knowing, though, that no continent has a lower median age than Africa (See interactive chart HERE), so this could be as much a reflection of demographics as it is of one age group's greater adoption of Twitter. Whatever the case, it's good news that it is young people that are driving Twitter usage, as they tend to be more demanding of change.
2. 57% of tweets from Africa are sent from mobile devices, including BlackBerrys and iPhones. By necessity, and for cost reasons, the mobile phone is Africa's PC.
3. Although 80% of those polled said they use Twitter mainly to communicate with friends, more than two-thirds said they use it to monitor news.
4. Twitter is helping to form new links within Africa. The majority of those surveyed said that at least half of the Twitter accounts they follow are based on the continent. This is great news! It suggests young Africans are not slavishly following what's "cool" in America or Europe at the expense of keeping abreast of what's going on elsewhere on the continent. This wasn't always the case, and it bodes well for greater cooperation between African countries.
5. Not so good news: Besides notable exceptions like Rwanda's president Paul Kagame and South African president Jacob Zuma, political leaders are mostly absent from Twitter. Out of touch with the people? What else is new?
There is still much we'd like to know. For instance, if it is true that the vast majority of tweets come from a small minority of users, is that pattern mirrored across Africa, and if so, what are the defining characteristics of these heavy tweeters?
And what accounts for the different percentages by country of those who've enabled geo-tagging, and how do these figures compare with countries in other parts of the world?
But, for the time being, we'll take this, thank you very much.
A high resolution version of the infographic is available for download HERE.
