tag = "Africa"

Suddenly social networks are everywhere you turn and new ones are seemingly jumping up on a daily basis. We bet that there are a few local ones that you've never even heard of, but you'll find that each is quite popular with a highly active user base.
What defines a good social network and what are the current South African audience trends and likelihood for business marketing sustainability?

The South African social networking landscape can mostly be grouped into two categories: fun/personal and business.

The fun or personal networks are still surpassing the usage of business platforms effortlessly by 2:1. They are mostly geared towards students and individuals between the ages of 18-35 and cater to narcissistic behaviour. Status updates, useful community and city information such as event listing, personal photo sharing, messaging and staying up to date with faraway friends and family and dating are some of the other features.

Symbiotic Media Consortium has released Sembuse, East Africa's first mobile social network and content platform, where users can purchase stock information, news and videos.

Sembuse allows users to communicate cheaply at 50 Kenya cents (US$0.006) per message, up to 1,000 characters, using the SMS (Sembuse Messaging Suite) within the Sembuse network.

Mobile social networking company MXit, with 13 million subscribers worldwide, has introduced Africa's first Mobile Book (MBook), in a bid to promote literacy and reading among its majority youth audience.
As of today, MXit users will be able to download an entire book - “Emily and the Battle of the Veil” - on the network, at a cost of ZAR13.50.

Symbiotic Media Consortium - www.symbiotic.co.ke, a hybrid technology and marketing firm based in Nairobi, Kenya has released East Africa’s first mobile social network – Sembuse (www.sembuse.com). Sembuse allows users to communicate cheaply at 50 Kenya cents (USD 0.006) per message using the SMS (Sembuse Messaging Suite). With conventional text limited to 160 characters and an average cost of Ksh.3.50 (USD 0.043), Sembuse gives 1,000 characters per SMS at a fraction of the cost of conventional text, allowing unprecedented savings and value addition. Also in the event that the person you wish to reach is not on your Sembuse network, users can use regular text at a subsidized rate of Ksh.2.50 (USD 0.031)to any GSM network in EastAfrica

Mobile News Reporting

Because of the lack of basic infrastructure, getting information from one place to another quickly is often extremely difficult. A number of organizations have tackled this problem using Mobile devices. mPedigree offers a way to authenticate pharmaceutical drugs and prescriptions using SMS. Winafrique tackles issues with communication and power by offering wind powered cellular towers. QuestionBox.org collects data from and distributes it to rural areas using a SMS/web/voice platform. Ushahidi allows people to report and geolocate incidents of violence and incident using SMS.