Cape Town - Rich media on social networks is driving internet traffic in South Africa as data and device costs decline.
According to a survey by Fuseware and World Wide Worx, rich media applications like YouTube are on the increase in SA.
The SA Social Media Landscape 2015 study was released on Wednesday showed that 11.8 million South Africans are regularly logging on to Facebook, followed by YouTube at 7.2 million.
"The global rise of video is now making itself felt here. Once the cost of mobile data comes down for the emerging smartphone market, video will become a dominant medium, strongly supported by other visual media", said Arthur Goldstuck, managing director of technology market researchers World Wide Worx.
The results corroborate earlier studies that indicate a massive increase in data consumption as people turn to rich media content on the internet.
'Secret'
Cisco's Visual Networking Index predicated that between 2013 and 2018, mobile data traffic in South Africa will have a compound annual growth of 53% and will reach an annual run rate of two Exabytes by 2018.
Most of that data demand is due to the appetite for video content over the internet. But the increase will also be the result of an increasing number of smart devices that connect to the web and conduct machine to machine communications.
The social media study found that Twitter's growth in SA had slowed to 20%, and there are around 6.6 million South Africans on the one to many messaging service.
But professional networking service LinkedIn has jumped by 40% to 3.8 million users while local social network Mxit has seen further decline to 4.9 million from 6.5 million subscribers.
For companies that would like to use social networks to build their brands, it is not simply a matter of getting a like on Facebook or a retweet on Twitter.
"The secret for companies trying to leverage social networks lies not only in numbers of users, but also in how heavily those users engage in these networks. Twitter has more intensive engagement than Facebook, despite having substantially fewer users," said Mike Wronski, CEO of Fuseware.
The survey found that 65 of South Africa's biggest brands were actively engaged in social media with a majority planning to increase spending in 2015.
"Content marketing and influencer marketing are two big trends corporates are embracing as the market matures", Wronski added.
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