These are Africa’s 10 most successful brands on social media

Africa is an increasingly social continent. In 2014, announced that it had more than 100-million African users, accounting for more than half the continent’s internet users. More than 80% of those Facebook users also access it via mobile.

And while Facebook is undoubtedly the biggest, there are any number of other social platforms available across Africa. As the continent’s bandwidth capacity continues to explode, the number of people using those platforms will only keep growing. That in turn means that it’s more important than ever for companies not to just be on those platforms, but to use them in engaging and meaningful ways.

While there’s no guarantee of which brands will be doing that successfully in a few years’ time, the ones doing it well now are probably best-placed to keep doing it in the future. But which brands are those?

According to the Africa Brand Index, a listing put together by Ornico and Fuseware, TV channels, retailers, and car companies are doing social best right now.

Read more: Could social media be the future for remittances to Africa?

The brands featured on the list measured by an aggregate score of dozens of social signals including community growth, content performance, and brand sentiment. The research tool examines reach, brand growth, and social media user sentiment about brands on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. It also measures community engagement with branded content.

The Africa Brand Index will also enable people to search industries – such as media, retail, auto, and others – to determine top brands in each sector. A search for the top brands in each of the countries surveyed, namely South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, can be performed.

“To create Ornico’s Africa Brand Index we pre-selected over 500 of Africa’s top brands and measured their performance on social media’s big four, which of course are Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook,” said Ornico’s CEO, Oresti Patricios. “These first results clearly show how effective media brands are in terms of leveraging social media, and it came as no surprise that Supersport was at the top of the league”.

Ornico said it envisaged that brand owners and managers, together with marketers, advertising agencies and public relations practitioners, would find the Africa Brand Index useful. “Anyone who is involved with building of brands by growing communities or curating content on the big four will find the index useful and insightful,” said Mike Wronski, founder of Fuseware.

Read more: Mxit: the rise and collapse of ‘Africa’s largest social network’

“As researchers we’ve discovered that brand owners and managers have struggled to find a universally agreed metric to measure online performance,” Wronski said. “A big problem we’ve encountered is the measurement of social content online using Advertising Value Equivalents. This is a completely erroneous way of measuring reach, social media performance or representing a return on content investment,” Wronski added.

“What’s exciting about the Africa Brand Index is that it offers an accurate benchmark that is generated through an algorithm, which means that there isn’t any human intervention in arriving at the scores,” Wronski said. “Social media increasingly plays a pivotal role in building brands. As digital media make up for a greater part of media consumption, it has become critical to accurately measure social media performance, and to do so in a way that benchmarks reach and engagement. Because of this we’re really pleased that we’ve been able to contribute toward the accurate benchmarking of brands on the big four – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram,” Wronski said.

Check out the top 10 brands below: