• Econet introduces unlimited Facebook access for $3 a month

    This is ofcourse something we have wished for a long time now that mobile operators would do. It just makes business sense; social business for us subscribers that is! Econet announced yesterday that they have introduced an unlimited access to Facebook promotion that will last until the end of February next year. As part of…

  • Rent or buy Facebook friends?

    Not long ago someone asked an interesting question in the answers forum: How did Baba Jukwa get his seemingly huge following? It would appear the answer was just plain simple […]

  • At least 1.1 million active Facebook users in Zimbabwe

    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…

  • Where to find Zimbabwe 1st TV on the internet: Streaming, YouTube, Facebook

    Zimbabwe 1st TV went live yesterday as promised. But they are not just beaming to free-to-air satellite TV decoders, the channel is available for online viewing. The channel can be viewed as streaming service you Ustream, viewed as recorded shows on YouTube, and followed on Facebook

  • Local bargains ad service, Bargain Buddy, grows rapidly on Facebook

    In less than a month, a Facebook page dedicated to bargains in Zimbabwe has attracted more than 9,000 new followers and more than 3,000 people ‘talking about it’ at a time on the social network. The rapid growth, according to the owner of the page Sean Steyn, is indication that people are finding it useful…

  • Facebook opens up: Now you can target Zimbabwe on Facebook

    If you have tried to target Zimbabweans with Facebook ads in the past, (because social is king of audience numbers right now, and Facebook is right there at the top) you probably found, much to your disappointment, that Facebook wouldn’t let it.

  • WhatsApp now more popular globally than Twitter. Challenging Facebook on usage

    It goes without saying especially locally, that WhatsApp is more popular than other social (or instant messaging services). We can’t even compare Twitter usage to that of WhatsApp in Zimbabwe.

  • Facebook Home, Mark Zuckerberg and the next 5 billion devices

    When Facebook unveiled yesterday what was supposed to be the Facebook Phone but ended up just being more a pervasive app (or shall we call it a launcher), we found the following by the Facebook chief standing out.

  • What Facebook’s Graph Search means for individuals, business and developers

    Facebook launched its latest product, a ‘Search Engine’ at a function in California, USA, earlier this week. The facility, titled ‘Graph Search’, is rather more of a Search Engine but only for content resident on the Social Networking site and its possible functionalities were explained in an article on this platform yesterday.

  • Facebook’s Graph Search is here. What is it?

    Facebook recently announced the latest addition to its social network, the social graph search engine. When introducing it on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg called it “the third pillar of the Facebook Ecosystem”.

  • Facebook takes on WhatsApp, Kakao Talk, WeChat and their friends

    The news of the day yesterday was that Facebook is looking to buy WhatsApp, and today, well the angle has changed a bit; Facebook is building, and has launched what really looks like its own WhatsApp. A brief post on Facebook’s news page today announced the introduction of “A New Way to Sign Up for…

  • The most ‘liked’ Facebook pages in Zimbabwe

    Even locally, the need for a social media strategy to build a community around a brand or an initiative is clear. Recently, through Techzim Answers and our Facebook page, we […]

  • One billion people milestone for Facebook!

    Mark Zuckerburg, the famous founder and CEO of the world’s largest social network Facebook, announced today that his company now has more than 1 billion monthly active users. The announcement […]

  • Facebook feed gets more commercial with paid for Facebook Offers

    If you’re a Facebook page admin and your page has more than 400 likes, you probably woke up to an encouraging you to start using the Facebook Offers feature. The […]

  • Two Econet Wireless Facebook pages. The more popular one is fake

    Note: There was a significant development to this story just before we published it. We decided to put the development as an update below the story. This has happened before […]

  • Facebook tops mobile web browsing in Africa (and other mobile internet stats)

    Yesterday, Opera Software released its monthly State of the Mobile Web report, and this month focused on the growth of the mobile web browsing in Africa. The report looks at […]

  • FNB’s Social Banking; all socially, right inside Facebook

    South Africa’s third largest bank by market capitalization recently announced the newest in their impressive suite of value added services  dubbed FNB Social Banking. The service allows FNB customers to check their […]

  • 5 Startup lessons from Facebook IPO

    So you are Tengesa, ForgetMeNot, Dariro, 6tm solutions, and countless other Zimbabwean and African startups that are hoping to change the world and you are looking at Facebook’s IPO; you […]

  • Facebook, WhatsApp & the transition of social networking to mobile

    Over the last few weeks there has been a lot talking on social networking, its related technologies and its adoption by users worldwide. Facebook, Google+, Twitter and other similar services are being treated by some of us as true social networking platforms. Some of our colleagues have gone on to separate such services as WhatsApp,…

  • Africa mostly not on Facebook, and not on Zuckerberg’s to do list

    Is it that Africa is not commercially active on the internet and therefore doesn’t matter much in the ad revenue scheme of things? Or are African populations too fragmented to approach efficiently as a market? Is Zuckerberg missing an entire continent of more than 1 billion people whose access to the internet is clearly on…

  • SA micro-payments startup, ZunguZ, allows money transfer via Facebook

    South Africa’s Rob Sussman and Lance Fanaroff introduced (officially) in December of 2011 a cost-free money transfer system that allows anyone on Facebook to transfer money to anyone else on Facebook. The two founders have taken the concept to Facebook’s Palo Alto offices and to prominent banks and financial institutions where they have received the…

  • Nigerian Twitter & Facebook traffic update service nominated for Shorty Awards

    Lagos’ traffic guide Gidi Traffic received a nomination for the globally renowned Shorty Awards which recognize the best short format content creators on the Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. In the “Life Saving Hero” award category, Gidi Traffic is up against 399 other nominees with most of them coming from the United…

  • If you can’t beat them, just quit: H-Metro is off Facebook

    This social media thing didn’t work for H-Metro. Last month, we reported that H-Metro, an extremely popular tabloid in Harare, was faced with the difficult problem of dealing with a more popular impostor. On Facebook that is. The fake H-Metro Facebook page had 11,379 fans then while the real one was struggling for attention, only…

  • Telecel skins Opera Mini, offers free access to Facebook Page

    We’re getting information that Telecel Zimbabwe subscribers who use Opera Mini on their mobile phones can now access the Telecel website and Facebookpage for free. We’re gathering that the promotion started yesterday in the morning.

  • Zimbabwe’s image problem: Facebook caning linked to human rights abuse

    Zimbabwe clearly has an image problem. When we posted a note on Monday about the caning sentence for a Chiredzi boy who ‘slandered’ a local woman on Facebook, we sincerely thought two cane strokes was not a big deal. Really. For us the important thing was that someone had managed to get some kind of…

  • Zimbabwe boy to be caned for Facebook mischief

    We’re reading the Herald this morning that a 17-year old boy in Chiredzi (a town in south-east Zimbabwe) has been sentenced to two strokes of a cane by a local magistrate after being convicted of posting pictures of a local woman and describing her as a prostitute on the popular social network.

  • Facebook access without the web. Orange follows FMNA, Gemalto

    The one thing clear about telecoms in Africa is that basic phones still rule. There’s another thing too clear to ignore; it is that people on the continent love Facebook. Facebook is so popular, for many Africans Facebook’s the first point of contact with the Internet. Orange has woken up to this fact. The mobile…

  • Two H-Metro Facebook Pages. The more popular one is fake.

    Zimbabwe’s popular H-Metro tabloid newspaper H-Metro has two Facebook Pages. The bad news (for H-Metro) is that the most popular one, and the most recently updated one at that, is the fake one. The fake H-Metro Facebook Page has 11,379 likes, while the real one has just 3,854 likes.

  • Estimating the number of Facebook users in Zimbabwe

    There has been a lot of curiosity about Zimbabwe’s Facebook population lately. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t provide Zimbabwe’s Facebook stats because of, well, you guessed it, we’re a bad people. Or at least the targeted US sanctions say some leaders here are.

  • Our experience migrating from Disqus to Facebook comments

    Before we moved the comments system on this site from Disqus to Facebook about a week ago, we had thought about it for a while and the decision wasn’t any easy one to make. Eventually we decided to move. And this is why: