It’s estimated that 720 million Africans (out of a population of one billion) have mobile phones. Out of this number, 167 million are using the Internet with smartphones, and increasing numbers of people are joining social networks to connect with the world.
The Nairobi office of Portland, a communications consultancy, has done a study on geo-located tweets from Africa’s 20 biggest cities in the last three months of 2013 and presented the results in a series of infographics.
It turns out that Johannesburg is the city with the most geo-located tweets, followed by Cairo and then Nairobi. Twitter users in Africa are most active on Tuesdays and Fridays and least active on Wednesdays and Sundays. The biggest spike in Twitter activity was around Nelson Mandela’s death on 5 December 2013. The top hashtags were sport, politics, brand and Mandela-related.
