By Sam Viney, Co-Founder, Tilt House

It’s official: Kenya and South Africa love social media. On average, people in these two countries spend more time on social media than anyone else in the world, averaging over three and a half hours per person each day. As an Arsenal Football Club fan, this doesn’t surprise me. Type "Arsenal" into any social media platform, and it quickly sparks millions of comments from Kenyan diehards.

Enough about Arsenal; it’s been a lacklustre season so far. What’s particularly striking is that, despite Africa having the lowest proportion of people globally with internet access, the continent ranks disproportionately high in social media usage. It’s not just Kenya and South Africa—four of the top 20 countries with the highest per capita social media usage are in Africa.

Facebook Is Still the Norm

What’s behind this? Social media, rather than websites, is the norm in Africa. It’s clear too that Facebook reigns supreme across the continent. While the platform has been pushed out by newer competitors in Europe and the US, in Africa it’s still the main player.

As of 2022, Facebook boasted 271 million African users, with the number projected to rise to over 377 million by 2025. Facebook accounts for more than half of all social media traffic in the region.

Facebook’s dominance in Africa is no coincidence. A decade ago, the company launched an ambitious plan to use drones to beam internet connectivity to rural areas across Africa and Asia. The project was short-lived, but Facebook quickly pivoted, launching Internet.org, which later morphed into ‘Free Basics’, offering millions of people living in Africa free access to Facebook and a select number of other platforms. While users could access information on the platform often without having to pay for data, the format was limited: no photos, videos, or audio – just basic text.

Internal documents leaked by the Wall Street Journal in 2022 revealed that the programme helped Facebook gain an astonishing 10 million new users per month in the second half of 2021 alone. Furthermore, partnerships between telecommunications firms and social media companies have led to ‘social bundles’, which give users free access to specific social media channels for a certain period of time.

While TikTok has been steadily chipping away at Facebook’s market share in Africa, the platform remains dominant, particularly in low-income and rural areas. As the continent’s population continues to grow rapidly and register its online presence, Facebook is compensating for losses in Europe and the US by gaining new users in Africa.

Facebook is a Search Engine

I met Timothy in Nairobi in 2023 when the 60-year-old painter's Arsenal-themed signs and knick-knacks unsurprisingly caught my eye. “Yeah, I’m on Facebook,” said Timothy. “I’ve got to sell my work. I write about each one of my products on there, and people just contact me to buy them.” Our conversation reveals that Timothy has used social media as a search engine for years to flog his rather charming football memorabilia. He doesn’t have a website but provides long descriptions of his work, has a public business page, and shares videos of his products on Facebook and Meta-owned WhatsApp. He estimated that a solid 30% of his sales involved Facebook or WhatsApp in some shape or form.

Anyone working in social media and digital communications will have heard the new truism, or perhaps cliché, in marketing that “social media is the now a search engine". Forbes reports that one-quarter of global consumers now use social media to search for answers to questions and find products. For Gen Z, the number is even higher — half of them use social media as their primary search engine for information and to buy goods.

This year, marketing teams have been scratching their heads: if people are actively looking for answers to specific questions, not just seeking entertainment or passively absorbing information on social media, how can we create content that serves them and meets their needs? In practice, this means creating longer, more factual posts that blend video, text and ‘meta-data’ (descriptions of what you are posting about on the backend of Facebook) which are more educational and searchable in nature. At Sun King, Africa’s largest off-grid solar company, Tilt House is working with their fabulous social media team to help make solar more searchable on social media. It works! Social media is a fast-growing source of sales.

Having developed African social media projects and channels for over a decade, I can confidently say that social media has always been the primary search engine for the continent. The paucity of e-commerce websites and traditional information-heavy web platforms, in conjunction with the prevalence and ease of access to social media, means that, in some ways, social media is the internet for certain demographics in Africa. This trend isn’t a recent development — it’s been the case for years. This dynamic arguably becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: social media is the norm, so people only post on social media, and website and app development become more of a ‘nice to have’ than a ‘need’ for many resource-constrained organisations and businesses.

Traditional e-commerce websites and apps are becoming more and more common across Africa, but social media — primarily Facebook — remains the main online storefront for almost all businesses, large and small, across the continent. Yes, Instagram is important for younger users and TikTok for even younger ones, but Facebook provides an often-free way for all customers to search for, contact, promote and rate businesses — all in one fell swoop.

Over the last decade, Facebook has adopted deliberate strategies to expand its reach on the continent, and reach those with limited or no previous access to the internet. The moral questions surrounding access to information and net neutrality are pertinent. In India, for example, Facebook’s ‘Free Basics’ approach has engendered fierce criticism, leading to new policies preventing it from introducing its free app. African governments have largely, thus far, opted not to follow the same approach.

What next?

Ghana, Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa are among the top 20 countries globally for social media usage. Despite internet ‘blackouts’ and social media ‘taxes’ in countries like Ethiopia and Uganda, where governments have limited or temporarily closed access to the internet and social media platforms, it’s highly likely that we’ll see more African nations enter the Top 20 list very soon.

Today, most people in Africa have potential access to smartphone data coverage. Smartphone affordability remains the key barrier to mobile internet for most. But, prices have reduced dramatically with an influx of devices priced at below $100. Companies like Sun King and M-Kopa are offering bottom-of-the-financial-pyramid customers with affordable and fair loans to purchase phones, paying them off over 12 to 18 months, improving access to this modern necessity.

It stands to reason that of those gaining access to the internet for the first time in Africa, many will use it primarily to access social media because it is either free to access or heavily subsidised. Just as my Mum’s loyalty to her recently hacked AOL email account attests (sorry, Mum), people’s first introduction to the internet will have a lasting legacy. Facebook is creating a captive audience in rural Africa by providing free or close-to-free access to its channels.

What does this mean?

Communications professionals must pay close attention to the evolving African digital media landscape. The global internet landscape has undergone significant changes, with social media now playing the central role – duh, of course. However, nowhere is this more pronounced than in remote Africa communities, where social media serves as a primary channel for accessing information.

Treating social media as a search engine is not a trend confined to Africa alone — people worldwide are actively turning to social media to search for products, services and information. However, in Africa, this dynamic will continue to be increasingly pronounced. With limited access to traditional search engines, a paucity of traditional websites promoting services, and the often-prohibitive cost of services like Google for consumers, it's smart to make sure that information is made highly searchable on social media platforms. This is an art and a science: businesses and content creators are capitalising on the demand for accessible, easily searchable information in a digital ecosystem where social media is the first point of call.

How people access social media in Africa and what people can access on the internet will have significant political, social and business implications. Greater regulation and scrutiny of how African citizens access information through social media and who bears the cost of that access is critical. At the same time, Kenyans and South Africans will continue spending over three and a half hours daily on social media. It’s where people communicate. Communications professionals looking to engage communities who have recently gained access to the internet should be aware of these unique dynamics.