Until April this year, advertisers on Facebook could not target Facebook users inn Zimbabwe. Some issue related to US sanctions against the country apparently. Anyway, because of this, it was hard to estimate the number of Facebook users in Zimbabwe, because a common tool to do that is the advertising tool itself. But that didn’t stop us from employing workarounds to do that.
We don’t have to employ work arounds anymore because Facebook allows targeting Zimbos now. if you have tried to advertise on Facebook over the past couple of weeks you will know that Facebook says there’s an estimated 1.1 million active Facebook accounts inn Zimbabwe. The exact figure this morning is 1,140,000. Of those, 65% are male the tool says. men have more access to tech tools than their female counterparts?
Genders aside, one interesting thing we noticed is that the total number of Facebook users in Zimbabwe has been rising drastically since April. Back then when we checked, the number was 700,000. Then when we checked again in June, it was about 800,000. In early July that figure rose to 1,020,000. This means either the number of Facebook users has increased by 62% in just 4 months (highly unlikely) or the number is self correcting as existing connect to the network since April (considering Facebook just enabled the feature for the country that is)
There are however other reasons that we think could contribute to the drastic increase. The Baba Jukwa effect we think is one of them.
image via dawncompk.files.wordpress.com
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12 comments
Aah, I liked the Baba Jukwa Effect…..
Great stuff and and we agree with you facebook markerting has landed in Zimbabwe and we are one of the biggest sites on line https://www.facebook.com/ZimbabweOpenMarket
Not even close to the top 5 sorry, mr spammer.
tinm@n what top 5 are you talking about like who?? its easy to dismiss people as spammers. You invite people to comment and when they do that you label them as spammers whats with the bitterness??
moita nezvei nhai eddie (guerrero?)
info i acknowledged the article and commented that we are one of those Facebook on line markets and @99cc7ce3550f7e6b3e22161a5bcdb561:disqus started spewing calling me a spammer. So i kindly asked him/her to tell me of any other FB market sites
The problem with saying 1,140,000 users is that there may there may be some who have more than one account. Let’s call them “accounts” and not “users”. It’s always difficult to establish the exact number of users. Did I cut any celebration short?
celebrating what exactly?
All the while we local developers say there isn’t a market. Hehe even though none of us has ever had a product get to half of those users.
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[…] In 2013, like this time, the simple method used to come to the numbers was to create a Facebook advert and set Zimbabwe as the target audience. When you’ve created an advert and set Zimbabwe as your target audience, the number revealed is the approximate number of people that you’d potentially reach in Zimbabwe per month. […]
[…] In 2013, like this time, the simple method used to come to the numbers was to create a Facebook advert and set Zimbabwe as the target audience. When you’ve created an advert and set Zimbabwe as your target audience, the number revealed is the approximate number of people that you’d potentially reach in Zimbabwe per month. […]