Why SA is the 10th largest Twitter user

The other day I found out that South Africa is the 10th largest Twitter user on the planet. 10th! That’s pretty damn cool. The US is by far the largest in terms of users right now, but we are right up there with the big boys, like the UK and Sweden, and ahead of many others, like Japan. And it’s especially amazing when you consider how low our internet penetration is.

So how come we’re punching so far above our weight? What does that say about us as a people or our national spirit?

Maybe it means that we’re innately “early adopters”, open to new things and ideas. Maybe new stuff fizzes our excitement glands into overdrive. I suppose being situated in the bottom end of “the dark continent” puts us on some kind of frontier — so maybe we’re used to pioneering new ideas, if not necessarily new lands. Hmm.

Or perhaps we are so far away from most of the world that we just simply want to share our experiences with them. It’s a platform for us to tune into the global radio and get our share of the airtime.

However, if I look at what SAffers, and more specifically Joburgers, are tweeting about today, the main trends (info thanks to happn.in) coming out are The World Cup, The Eskom Board and Bobby Godsell, Kelly Clarkson’s concert here, Chicken Licken (go figure?), Julias (there’s a great tweet from haiybo.co.za: “Julius Malema gets police protection after near-fatal exposure to IQ test!”) and The Berlin Wall. Just one “international” item in the top 10. So maybe we’re just obsessed with ourselves and use Twitter simply as a way to talk about me me me!

Whatever the reason, it looks like the people of South Africa are excited about and open to new technologies and new ways of communicating. If you haven’t yet jumped on the social media wagon, I suggest you climb aboard and take a little ride. Because whether we like it or not it’s here to stay and is only going to grow — especially in our country it would seem. And when more people start tweeting from their mobiles, I think we’re going to race up in those global rankings pretty quick.