Facebook goes past 100m African users

Everyone wants a slice of Africa. That’s hardly surprising given its young population, fast-growing economies massively high mobile penetration. And given Facebook’s domination of the global social networking space, it should hardly be surprising that it’s claimed a larger chunk of the continent’s population than most.

The big blue social network today announced that there are now more than 100-million registered Facebook users in Africa, accounting for about half of the 200-million or so Africans connected to the internet.

Given that Africa has pretty much always been a mobile-first continent, it should hardly be surprising that more than 80% of those users come to Facebook every month on mobile.

A number of regions across the continent however remain plagued with poor bandwidth, which means that the media-rich products Facebook’s putting out into more developed markets wouldn’t really work. It makes sense then that it’s rolled out a couple of new products for the next tier of emerging market countries.

One of the cleverest of these is “click to missed call”, which was announced in July. Here’s how it works, according to Facebook:

When a person sees an ad on Facebook they can place a “missed call” by clicking the ad from their mobile device. In the return call, the person receives valuable content, such as music, cricket scores or celebrity messages, alongside a brand message from the advertiser — all without using airtime or data.

Now the inner cynic in all of us might balk at that, but you’ve got to hand it to Facebook, it knows how to get the most out of all its customers.

“People in high-growth countries want to be connected to the world around them,” says Nicola Mendelsohn, EMEA VP at Facebook. “In countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, Turkey, and elsewhere, mobile devices are increasingly the way people find new information, and share their new experiences in the world. We also know that people will experience Facebook in unique ways across the world, especially in high-growth regions like Africa.”