Mxit Launch: social integration finally hits the platform

It’s about time. It seems Mxit has finally wised up to the rest of the world and has announced a social monitoring tool dubbed Mxit Launch. The new product allows brands and communities to get on to the platform. In essence, it will give social media and community managers a chance to include Mxit in their overall strategy.

“This tool set is perfect for brands and community owners wanting to easily and quickly build a presence on Mxit,” says Vincent Maher, VP product strategy and growth at Mxit.

According to the company, the browser-based product, which is free, enables community managers to build apps to host, engage and grow their community on the platform. The main aim of the product, the company says, is to give community owners, particularly social media managers, control and visibility of their community activity on Mxit.

Maher emphasises that it is important for the product to be free saying, “in order to be fully integrated into the social media sphere, it has to be free.”

“Up until now, the only way to bring brands onto the Mxit platform was to build the app yourself, engage with one of the preferred developers or have Mxit do it for you. For simple community engagements that do not require specific functionality, Mxit Launch becomes another avenue to bring brands onto the platform,” the company says.

The kinds of functionality Mxit Launch will offer include:

• Content publishing
• Interactions and moderation
• Free broadcast messaging with segmentation
• Google Analytics integration
• Ad injection
• Micro-billing
• Competitions
• Real money payments with Mxit Money

The service is currently in closed beta and will be available to the public March next year.

Mxit says it has 40-million registered users, who currently send 750-million messages a day. The active user figure is about one-quarter of that at about 9.5-million monthly active users in South Africa, with about 0.5-million based in the rest of the world.

Mxit is one of Africa’s largest mobile media companies, and claims its platform is available in more than 120 countries, attracting audiences from regions as diverse as Malaysia, Kenya, India, Indonesia, the US, Nigeria, Brazil, Italy, Portugal and Spain.