More and more people are gaining access to smartphones: the number of unique mobile users grew 7% from January 2017 to January 2018! 48% of South Africans use mobile messengers – and only 45% use their phones to take photos and videos, and only 36% use the alarm clock function. South Africa’s 30 million internet users are also mobile-focused, with mobile phones making up 71% of web traffic. In this regard, Nigeria anticipated trends that have now hit Europe and North America and shows a huge amount of business potential. E-commerce businesses have used WhatsApp to offer customer support, Chatbots help users in a variety of use cases via WhatsApp, and even banks offer fiscal management on WhatsApp. Nigeria has also been the site of pioneering business activity via WhatsApp since 2017. In terms of social media, who’s ahead in Nigeria? WhatsApp and Facebook are both tied with 41% of the population, with Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook Messenger far below, with just 25% and 24% of the population. 21% of users social media at least once daily to check the news.

That’s a lot of smartphones! 63% of Nigerian consumers access the internet most often via smartphone, and social media plays a huge role. Try your free trial of the MessengerPeople solution now.Īccording to Statista’s Media in Africa dossier, Nigeria had over 200 million internet users in 2020, and more than 80% of web traffic came from mobile users. Interested in reaching customers via mobile messaging? With internet infrastructure in a developing state, low-data mobile apps are the most convenient for African users, explaining WhatsApp’s dominance.

Overall, internet usage in Africa is lower than in most other parts of the world, and mobile internet heavily dominates – as you can see in the Statista graphic below. Despite the existence of a few “homegrown” African messaging apps, WhatsApp is the #1 messaging app in most English-speaking African countries as well. On a continent-level, WhatsApp is absolutely dominant – as Quartz Africa has also reported. Today in our Global Messenger Landscape series we have a lot of ground to cover – we’ll be taking a look at a variety of English-speaking countries in Africa, and assessing what business potential messaging apps offer in this different digital playing field.

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