I decided to comment on a document i received recently which is the Africa Practice Social Media Landscape - a document that attempts to identify the top social media users whether they be brands or individuals -and the Alder report for brands. This came about because i received the request via an email from my boss. I thought it would be interesting so i've decided to share my thoughts.
Enjoy!
The Alder Social Media Report (Top Rated Social Media Brands) ranks social media users across all platforms without homing in on a single platform. The report attempts to give a concise round-off of an entity's social media endeavours through providing a top-three ranking based on several criteria. That is, social media professionals and savvy internet users - who made up the panel of judges - presented their top
candidates based on the candidate's influence on his/her chosen social media platform.
In contrast, the Africa Practice Social Media Landscape presents top influencers on a specific social media platform - Twitter - and then presents a ranking of blogging sites by using Alexa - a web analytics company - data.
Also, it provides a comparison between a traditional journalist, twitteratis, bloggers and social commentators
The Africa Practice Social Media Report provides other important data such as
1. A table showing the top most visited sites in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Egypt.
interestingly, all ten of the sites are social media sites. Nairaland.com made number 7.
2. A brief internet usage report which highlighted that 72% of internet users in Nigeria visited social networking sites in 2013, 55% email and 46% entertainment
3. A comparison between Facebook and mobile chat apps (Eskimi, 2go and Whatsapp). This section showed that the chat apps all have more active users than Facebook in Nigeria. It mentioned that the
apps perform well because they are cheaper alternatives to SMS and use less bandwidth and data.
4. A brief discussion on the Impact of Social Media in driving accountability, civic engagement, branding and its use as a source for journalists and audiences.
Its twitter ranking was obtained based on: original tweets, replies, retweets and mentions.
The Alder report did not feature or mention a category in which any of the stations i work for were included despite their huge online following where as the Africa Practice Social Media Report listed Cool FM for Synchronizing the radio and social media effortlessly along with Beat FM. The Alder report didn't include a category on which radio stations whether online or terrestrial were represented.
In my opinion, both reports provide different data but have convergence points.
1. The Alder report provides rankings in a number of categories which are missing from the Africa
Practice report such as:Banking, Consumer, Faith, Insurance, Non-profit, Sports and Telecoms
2. The Alder report also provides expert rankings for Brands, Individuals and Foundations based on
specific parameters such as customer service, consumer engagement, Relevant Information, Speed of
Response, Up-to-date information, Visual Delight
3. The Alder report for top brands also further provided a ranking for individuals synonymous with certain categories.
4. SocialMedia giants such as GTB, Etisalat, who are very active on Facebook as well as Twitter were
however nowhere to be found in the Africa Practice report. Single focus on Twitter should still have produced such entities as outstanding but that wasn't the case.
In conclusion i think the Alder report is more conclusive and more reaching and encompassing and provides a greater sense and knowledge of the who-is-who in the Nigerian social media space. Its findings spread from individuals to governments to brands to faith-based organisations across Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Wordpress etc and ranks them not just in terms of followership numbers but such things as customer service, up-to-date information and other hard-to-define parameters. The selected brands, organisations and individuals stood out regardless of their preferred social media.
In addition, the Alder report includes four more volumes that break down categories further. See here.
The documents provide greater detail and more insight.
The Africa Practice report enlightens by providing numbers and tables and charts that inform about where Nigeria is in terms of mobile application users versus Facebook active users, a comparison between traditional journalism and the more modern forms like blogging, an Alexa ranking of top blogs and forums in Nigeria and other social media discussions. Its ranking efforts in my view are less reaching than the Alder report and also is limited to only Twitter and Blogs.
-By Bidemi Akinade
Bidemi is the social media specialist for Cool FM, Wazobia FM and Nigeria Info FM
He is also a tech enthusiast, a blogger and a graphic designer.
