The South African social media scene explained in 10 tweets

Arthur Goldstuck, the founder and CEO of research and analysis company World Wide Worx today took to Twitter to give the world a taste of the latest joint research from his company and social media monitoring and analysis company Fuseware on the South African social media landscape.

The findings suggest that while there is still room for growth on some social platforms — Twitter’s user base in the country has doubled in the last year — others are being hampered by a number of factors.

Facebook for instance, has pretty much reached saturation point in relation to the number of South Africans with internet access, while Google+ has pretty much flattened. While Goldstuck’s tweet-note didn’t provide any indication of why that might be, we would suggest that the people in the country who are using it are more tech-savvy early adopters who understand its potential benefits, while others don’t see the point when most of their social graph is on Facebook.

The tweet-note also suggests that social is seeing real growth as a business tool (see LinkedIn’s 20% growth over the past year) and that more and more executives understand its importance.

The research also seems to show that social media marketing in South Africa is becoming increasingly effective, but that there are still some fairly serious barriers in place, with effective time management of social posts being among the biggest.

1. Taste of #SocialSA: SA Twitter user base doubled this year and Facebook is near saturation for connected SA consumers.

— Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) August 2, 2013

2. Taste of #SocialSA: Instagram use has shot up, closely tied to Twitter as consumers share photos across the platforms.

— Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) August 2, 2013

3. Taste of #SocialSA: Social bookmarking site use has plummeted, including Delicious, Digg, Friendfeed and StumbleUpon.

— Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) August 2, 2013

4. Taste of #SocialSA: LinkedIn remains on a slow but steady growth curve in SA, with 20% growth from 2012.

— Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) August 2, 2013

5. Taste of #SocialSA: Google Plus uptake has flattened in South Africa – at approximately 500 000 active users.

— Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) August 2, 2013

6. Taste of #SocialSA: Executives buy into social: lack of management understanding much smaller barrier to entry in 2013.

— Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) August 2, 2013

7. Taste of #SocialSA: Largest barrier to social media brand success remains effective time management of the channels.

— Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) August 2, 2013

8. Taste of #SocialSA: 58% of major SA brands are now utilising Youtube as a marketing and communications medium.

— Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) August 2, 2013

9. Taste of #SocialSA: Of SA's biggest brands surveyed, 92% post at least once a week to their social profiles.

— Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) August 2, 2013

10. Taste of #SocialSA: 53% of social channels managed by marketing team; only 16% of brands outsource it to 3rd parties.

— Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) August 2, 2013

Goldstuck and Fuseware CEO Mike Wronski (along with a select panel of guests) will present the full results of the research on 10 September in Johannesburg and on 12 September in Cape Town.