{"id":1580,"date":"2016-06-09T11:57:23","date_gmt":"2016-06-09T10:57:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/?p=1580"},"modified":"2016-10-25T14:17:00","modified_gmt":"2016-10-25T13:17:00","slug":"the-power-of-twitter-in-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/2016\/06\/09\/the-power-of-twitter-in-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"The Power of Twitter in Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week I talked about <strong>Lagos and Nairobi as two \u201cCities in Motion.\u201d<\/strong> I was surprised that they have come out quite high in terms of \u201c<strong>public management<\/strong>\u201d at IESE\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.iese.edu\/research\/pdfs\/ST-0396-E.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">Cities in Motion Index<\/a> (CIMI). This dimension includes actions aimed at improving the design of new organizational and management models. Something kept me thinking: <strong>one of the indicators relates to the number of prominent twitter users<\/strong>, and I decided to dig a bit deeper.<\/p>\n<p>Some data from 2015 reported by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.howafricatweets.com\/Press-Release\/International-Press-Release.pdf\">Portland Communication<\/a> (with some seasoning added on my side):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Geolocated tweets<\/strong>: 1.6 billion in Africa; of these, 350 million (22 %) were geolocated in <strong>Nigeria<\/strong>, and 76 million (5 %) in <strong>Kenya<\/strong>. Compare this to the share of <a href=\"http:\/\/statisticstimes.com\/population\/african-countries-by-population.php\" target=\"_blank\">population<\/a>: out of 1.166 billion people in Africa, 183 million (15 %) are in Nigeria, and close to 47 million (4 %) in Kenya.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Top-3 hashtags<\/strong>:\n<ol>\n<li>In Nigeria: <strong>#music<\/strong>, <strong>#nigeria<\/strong>, and <strong>#nigeriadecides<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>In Kenya: <strong>#quote<\/strong>, <strong>#kenya<\/strong>, <strong>#mufc<\/strong> (I must confess that not being a follower of Manchester United, I had to look for what umfc means!).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<figure id=\"attachment_1583\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1583\" style=\"width: 711px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1583 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/files\/2016\/06\/The-power-of-social-networks-in-Africa.jpg\" alt=\"The power of social networks in Africa: Twitter\" width=\"711\" height=\"386\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/files\/2016\/06\/The-power-of-social-networks-in-Africa.jpg 711w, https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/files\/2016\/06\/The-power-of-social-networks-in-Africa-300x163.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/files\/2016\/06\/The-power-of-social-networks-in-Africa-500x271.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 711px) 100vw, 711px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-1583\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Dissenting voices and ideas have their way thanks to the Internet and social networks<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Going beyond these two countries, the <a href=\"http:\/\/mgafrica.com\/article\/2016-04-07-how-africa-tweets-surprising-trends-and-insights\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Mail &amp; Guardian Africa<\/em><\/a> highlights some interesting points based on Portland\u2019s report. For instance in more than 30 countries, the top hashtag contained the name of the country. Even more interesting are popular cross-country hashtags:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>#FeesMustFall<\/strong> (second top in South Africa) was initiated by a movement of students in Johannesburg, and spread to as far as Egypt and Ghana.<\/li>\n<li><strong>#stopbokoharam<\/strong> ranked as the 7<sup>th<\/sup> most popular hashtag in Cameroon. Of note: #BokoHaram was not among the top-10 hashtags out of Nigeria.<\/li>\n<li><strong>#kinshasa<\/strong> was Angola\u2019s top hashtag.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We all remember the <strong>Arab spring<\/strong>, and how <strong>social media were critical to let the world now about what was going on in Egypt<\/strong>. <strong>Maybe people in other African countries are trying to mirror<\/strong> that, and attract international attention. This may be happening already at the continental level.<\/p>\n<p>Dissenting voices and ideas have ways to make themselves heard. Could this be one reason why Lagos\u2019 and Nairobi\u2019s \u201cpublic management\u201d? This brings hope that social movements initiated by <strong>civil society \u2013 in particular, by middle classes \u2013 may exert pressure on those in power to make (hopefully positive) changes<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week I talked about Lagos and Nairobi as two \u201cCities in Motion.\u201d I was surprised that they have come out quite high in terms of \u201cpublic management\u201d at IESE\u2019s Cities in Motion Index (CIMI). This dimension includes actions aimed at improving the design of new organizational and management models. Something kept me thinking: one [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1654,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[99314],"tags":[89737,22,1346],"class_list":["post-1580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-and-institutional-context","tag-development","tag-social-networks","tag-technology","megacategoria-mc-africa"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1654"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1580"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1585,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1580\/revisions\/1585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}