Signpost: We don't like Facebook in SA, we love it

News posters this week declared that Facebook had lost a million local users and was being abandoned by South Africans. Broadcast media quickly leapt on the bandwagon.

This was startling, not least because respectable media were taking a social network seriously enough to make its numbers the big news of the day. But equally startling was that they were relying on claims made by an entity based in the Czech Republic without verifying the data locally.

When social media analysis company Socialbakers reported the disappearance of 967220 Facebook users in South Africa, it initially failed to mention that these users had not closed their accounts. Later it argued that the figure represented the number of users who had not logged on to the network in a specific 30-day period. In much the same way, it suggested that Facebook interest in Nigeria had slumped too.

In both cases, Socialbakers missed one of the factors that make social networking different in Africa. Typically, in South Africa and Nigeria, new users do not sign on through a website but download a Facebook app to their phones and sign on directly. In most cases, this means they do not have to provide their location.

Facebook makes an advert-planning tool available online for advertisers and researchers to analyse their user base. But the tool provides only the information that users, in turn, provided to Facebook when they joined .

The result is that, in a mobile-first environment such as SA, one out of every two new Facebook users does not appear on the radar when researchers rely only on this tool. "Data scrapers" who gather data only from existing online sources have previously found the advert-planning tool a boon. But now it's come back to bite them, revealing a misunderstanding of the African market.

Research by World Wide Worx has shown that, although Facebook has been growing rapidly in SA, its use on the phone has been accelerating even more rapidly. At the beginning of 2011, when Facebook was reporting 3.5million users in SA, close to four million were using it on their phones. In the next 18 months that gap widened. In mid-2012, Facebook reported fivemillion users, whereas consumer research showed 6.8million using it on their phones. That number was estimated to have reached eight million by the end of 2012.

Facebook itself has stated that it has 9.5 million users in SA as of early April, despite the online tool reflecting only 5.5million. This tallies with the growth suggested in the consumer research. It also means Facebook is about to become the single biggest social network in SA and will overtake instant messaging platform Mxit. This is big news for SA, indicating a population that is rapidly maturing in its use of digital tools. The cellphone was a revolution that is now recognised as serving a basic human need for communication.

Social networking takes that communication to a new level, turning it into, well, a social vehicle. It teaches individuals to use digital tools to engage more effectively in the economy. It is this good-news story that should have been grabbing the headlines this week.

• Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter: @art2gee