Apparently around 30% of South Africans are on Facebook.

That was just one social media statistic shared with the audience yesterday by social media and internet researcher Arthur Goldstuck.

The information is a part of the latest SA Social Media Landscape Report for 2018, which goes on to estimate that 30% translates to around 16 million South African Facebook users.

14 million of them access the platform from mobile devices, explains Business Tech and, to make matters even crazier, five million of them are in Johannesburg.

Goldstuck also had this gem to share:

There is a misconception that younger people are leaving Facebook; however, a demographic breakdown of the local user data shows that it’s just a case of the younger Facebook users getting older – simply put, they aren’t teenagers anymore.

Here’s a full look at the numbers:

But the social media landscape briefing didn’t only focus on Facebook.

Arthur Goldstuck, journalist and managing director of independent technology research and strategy organisation World Wide Worx, also revealed stats for other social media platforms:

Local Twitter numbers grew marginally between 2016 and 2017, despite declines seen in places like the US, Goldstuck said. In August 2016 there were approximately 7.7 million South Africans on Twitter – by August 2017, this grew to about eight million users.

Tweeting activity in South Africa continues throughout the week, with the most popular day being Thursday. Twitter users tweet the most in the morning, between 8am and 9am, with a small peak again in the evenings at around 6pm.

Professional social network LinkedIn was the ‘quiet’ growth success story of 2017, with the platform growing its local numbers to 6.1 million users from 5.5 million in 2016.

Instagram has also seen significant growth, with its South African user numbers up 8.5% to 3.8 million users, however this is significantly slower than previous years, where local growth was in the double, or even triple digits.

Here’s a simple tabulation of the data so you can make sense of it all:

LinkedIn bigger than Instagram? Makes sense – all you professionals you.

Boom boom pow.

[source:businesstech]