Language preference of MENA Facebook users (as percentage)

As expected, the language bias for Saudi Arabia’s Facebook users has now switched from English to Arabic. During the past three months the percentage of Facebook Arabic users in Saudi Arabia has crossed the 50% mark and now stands at 53% of total users of the platform. It’s a change of a few percent, but it’s going to be increasingly important for marketers as Facebook reaches new demographics of users, perhaps previously put off by having to user its English language interface.

Numbers of Facebook users by country (in millions)

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Morocco added the most new Facebook users during the past three months, with Egypt adding 641,000 new users. Egypt also added the most Arabic language users during the past three months, which accounted for 57% of its total new users added to Facebook. However, 81% of all new Saudi Facebook users were adopters of the Arabic platform. At this rate, we could well be looking at a 60:40 percent ratio of Arabic to English Facebook users in Saudi by the beginning of next year.

Overall, Facebook users in the Middle East and North Africa grew by 15% over the past three months adding some 2.2 million new Facebook users and bringing the total MENA Facebook population to 17.3 million.

Want to read more?

If you liked reading this post MENA Internet users, you might like our other Internet demographics and habits surveys:

Media consumption & habits of MENA Internet users (July 2010)

15 Million MENA Facebook Users – Report (May 2010)

Twitter & Customer Service Survey (March 2010)

Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey (2009)

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The figures in our new Media Consumption & Habits of MENA Internet Users Survey simply confirm what everyone involved in the Middle East’s growing digital marketing industry has already been talking about for the past year or two: Internet connectivity has become pervasive amongst many of our key target audiences and is now a significant part of their daily lives. The new research survey conducted by Effective Measure in conjunction with Spot On PR, underscores that the Internet opportunity is not just something that exists in the USA or Europe, its right here in the MENA region too. It’s not just a rich thing. It’s not just a youth thing. (And its not just a Facebook thing either). The Internet’s reach is now much broader than that and its influence in the Middle East and North Africa is now truly rivalling its traditional media counterparts and providing marketers with real (and highly measureable) alternatives.

Here are some of the survey’s key findings:

- MENA Internet users now spend more time browsing the Internet than they do watching TV.

- 88% of those surveyed stated that they access the Internet daily

- 71% of those surveyed stated that they watched television daily.

- Most traditional media have peaks and troughs in attention. Radio and newspapers achieve peak share of audience in the morning. Television audiences peak in the evening. However, the Internet holds audience attention fairly consistently throughout the day and well into the night.

- 28% more respondents watched TV during peak viewing hours than when viewership is at its lowest, at 7%),

- 20% of respondents stated that they use the Internet at any time-period surveyed, peaking at 33% in the evening (just 13% higher than the lowest period).

- Predictably, 73% of the survey’s respondents cited email as the activity they most often carried out online, ranking abover all other online activities.

- Social networking and search activities followed as the next highest ranking online activities for MENA Internet users, all coming it at about 40%.

- 54% of Internet users surveyed used mobile applications daily.

- 79% of Internet users surveyed spent up to three hours per day updating their social networks. 20% spent more than three hours updating their social networks.

- Internet users were more positive to companies and brands using “Internet marketing” than they were towards companies and brands using “social media marketing”.

- Most responses to our survey showed little variance between male and female respondents. However, there were a number of notable differences between the genders in their stated experiences with social media.

Survey Downloads

Download the full survey report (PDF)

Download the press release (English, Word doc)

Download the press release (Arabic, Word doc)

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Media consumption & habits of MENA Internet users by Effective Measure and Spot On Public Relations is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Want to read more?

If you liked reading this post MENA Internet users, you might like our other Internet demographics and habits surveys:

15 Million MENA Facebook Users – Report (May 2010)

Twitter & Customer Service Survey (March 2010)

Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey (2009)

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If you would like to receive reports like this by email click here to join Spot On PR’s mailing list.

Remember: a social media programme isn't just for Christmas!

I’ve been doing quite a lot of speaking at ‘online’ conference events and workshops recently (this will surprise nobody who knows me) and consequently meeting a lot of people who are experimenting with social media within their organisations. It’s something of a growing trend – typically, one person within an organisation has been using Facebook or Twitter, even blogging, and has come to realise that there is very real value to the organisation in ‘being there’. A lot of these people come from the communications department, although by no means all. At a recent event where I spoke to an audience of event managers, I found quite a lot of people who had responsibility for companies’ events were the drivers behind introducing social media to their organisations.

Something of a pattern has started to emerge. The enthusiast is given permission to open up a social media account because it seems harmless enough – the company’s management doesn’t ‘get’ social media and so doesn’t see any danger in letting the enthusiast play with it. The enthusiast starts out and quickly finds a ready audience of people responding, interacting and demanding information, access and insight. It all becomes hard to handle precisely because it has been successful – one person can’t keep up with the volume but has gained enough experience to see the potential for this new medium.

So they go back to their management and point out that the experiment has been a great success, customers are now talking to the company over this new medium and appreciating the new degrees of access it brings. Can we expand the programme now?

And many I talk to are right in the middle of that conversation, mired in ‘not just yet, there’s a recession on you know’ and ‘What’s the ROI?’ reactions from the management team that has allowed this thing to develop so far precisely because it has ascribed it no importance.

The trouble is that social media is a difficult habit to break. Having started engagement with customers, partners and other stakeholders online, you have set an expectation of accessibility that can only grow. These early steps are important and help to build experience and learning – but it can’t stop there. The very fact that these programmes now need additional resources and expansion shows that they’re doing something right. It’s odd, in fact, that management presented with something new that is actually working would balk at it.

Does this mean the death of newspapers? Not quite...

The seventeen countries we included in the Middle East and Northern Africa Facebook Demographics study have widely varied news media: some, like the UAE, have strong English news components while others, like North Africa, have strong French language daily and weekly news media. When you look at the penetration of newspapers per capita in the region there are some odd anomalies that show some very different reading habits – almost a million newspapers are sold in the UAE to a population of some 5 million people, while Saudi Arabia consumes just under 1.5 million daily newspapers with a population of 28 million.

But one thing stood out for us when we looked at regional newspaper distribution with our Facebook survey in mind: today, more people are on Facebook across the region than buy newspapers.

So what?

So what? They’re both totally different media, aren’t they? We don’t get pages and pages of news from Facebook and newspapers don’t tell us what our friends are thinking and doing.

Well, yes. But consider this. If I, as an advertiser, marketer or professional communicator, want to reach a regional audience, instantly and with guaranteed reach across the MENA region – can I do that using newspapers? Perhaps yes, if I was prepared to advertise in, and try to solicit coverage in, 144 Arabic newspaper, 29 English newspapers and something like 25 French ones. You also have the additional problem of selecting consumers. If I want to advertise to, or promote to, housewives in their 30s with two kids and good household incomes, why would I want to talk to millions of newspaper readers who don’t fit that demographic?

Of course, online advertising and promotion can be much more targeted than that – using content to attract consumers (the right content, of course, attracting the right consumer) and using context to ensure that I put my message in front of the right people at the right time, I can use a regional platform that has the punch of every single newspaper in the region, the ability to target within that audience. Let’s not forget, with online advertising I ideally only pay for results – it’s pay per click. I also would pay to generate content that attracts my target audience and I would have to fund the time my staff give to interacting with consumers. That is likely to be a tiny fraction of the cost of advertising in over 200 newspapers.

But Facebook isn’t about news, is it?

But the comparison doesn’t work because Facebook isn’t about news, surely? Well, that’s a great point. But we can’t say where the future’s taking us. Facebook is drawing in new features, the latest set of which (the ‘like’ button and its kin) bring powerfully Twitter-like features to Facebook, allowing people to ‘feed’ content through Facebook. This adds the powerful ‘discovery’ aspect of Internet usage to Facebook – people can share content and there’s every possibility that stronger offerings based around content sharing using Facebook as a platform will come in the future. But by that time, the landgrab will be over – and the newspapers will still be wondering what hit them and where it came from.

It’s also worth considering that Facebook is just one of a number of online platforms that are coming together to provide powerful information resources. We Google when we want to find information, use Twitter (and, increasingly Facebook), Digg or other tools to ‘discover’ information – either links to interesting stories our friends share or raw news being Tweeted and Twitpicced, posted up on Youtube or hosted on Flickr or Panoramio by eyewitnesses and we use RSS feeders to keep in touch with the blogs, websites and other news resources we’re interested in.

In this environment, we’re creating our own news feeds and resources. Our own newspapers – we no longer need an editor to serve up a dish of the news and content that will suit a median of a readership of thousands of ‘averaged’ readers. In the brave new world, each reader selects the information sources he or she is interested in rather than scanning the headlines of a newspaper for the stories that interest them.

In short, the strong adoption of online media in the Middle East is starting to build a compelling case for money to shift from print to online properties.

And that’s why comparing Facebook to print newspaper sales makes perfect sense to us.

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You can find Spot On PR on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/spotonpr

Download the press release (English, Word doc)

Download the press release (Arabic, Word doc)

Want to read more?

You can read our original blog post about May 2010’s MENA Facebook Demographics and download the full report here:

15 Million MENA Facebook Users – Report (May 2010)

Summary

Facebook has become a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East and North Africa and the platform can now claim 15 million users as of May 2010. Whilst Facebook saw strong early growth in 2008/2009 from English and French speaking users across the region, Facebook’s decision to add an Arabic interface in March 2009 has opened up access to a whole new demographic of Internet users and added 3.5 million Arabic users over the past year. Egypt and Saudi Arabia’s Facebook communities have seen the strongest growth among Arabic users during the past year with each adding 1.1 million Arabic language interface users. We soon expect the number of Arabic language Facebook users in Saudi to surpass the number of English users.

However, with the strong expectation that the weight of numbers will move from English language users to Arabic language users in a number of key MENA Facebook markets, today’s reality is that just 23% of users across the region use Facebook’s Arabic interface. So, those seeking to make the most of the Facebook platform are advised to keep up-to-date with its changing demographics.

Here are some of the key Facebook statistics covered in this report:

— There are now 15 million Facebook users in the Middle East & North Africa (this figure excludes Iran, Israel, Pakistan and Turkey).

— MENA’s top five Facebook country markets, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, account for 70% of all users in the region.

— 50% of MENA Facebook users have selected their primary language for using Facebook as English, with 25% preferring French and just 23% Arabic.

— Only 37% of Facebook users in MENA are female (compared with 56% in the USA and 52% in the UK). Only Bahrain and Lebanon Facebook communities approach gender equality with female users accounting for about 44% of total users.

— The GCC has five million Facebook users, which Saudi Arabia and the UAE representing 45% and 31% of that total respectively.

— North Africa has 7.7 million Facebook users, with Egypt accounting for 3.4 million users (or 44% of all North Africa users). Egypt has the largest Facebook community in MENA.

— Francophone countries Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia together account for 3.7 million French speaking Facebook users, equivalent to nearly 25% of all MENA users.

— Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia and Yemen all have Facebook communities with more than 50% of users below the age of 25 years old.

— The UAE has the oldest Facebook community in MENA with 41% of users being over 30 years old, 28% being 25-29 years old and 31% being under 25 years old.

You can find Spot On PR on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/spotonpr

Survey Downloads

Middle East & North Africa Facebook Demographics (May 2010)

Facebook beats newspapers in MENA (Press Release, English)

Facebook beats newspapers in MENA (Press Release, Arabic)

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Middle East & North Africa Facebook Demographics by Spot On Public Relations is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Want to read more?

If you liked reading this post about Facebook statistics, you might also like:

Twitter & Customer Service Survey (March 2010)

Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey (2009)

That’s the glass-is-half-full story.

The other half

The empty half of the glass is that the numbers of advertisers, developers, web ventures, educationalists and government departments using the Internet effectively in the Middle East is still remarkably small. Online marketers are all too often siloed in their own disciplines such as online advertising, website development, e-commerce and lately social media. Businesses very often see their online as a bolt-on to their traditional media campaigns and their website as an elaborate company brochure: and their view of the online world can be equally siloed. Sales might see the value in direct response from websites and email campaigns. Marketing may favour banner ads. Public relations may want to do social media, but marketing and IT are probably in disagreement over that. And customer service is often the elephant in the room, being largely ignored because online budget is owned by marketing.

Businesses across the region have been challenged over the past 20 years to reinvent themselves from being importers and sales agents to being marketing brands that are associated with providing customer value. Today the Internet is challenging Arab businesses to reinvent themselves again and become more open and more customer centric. The divide and rule school of business development no longer works, particularly on the Internet. With the arrival of Web 2.0 customers, non-customers and other key audiences can all be affected by the actions of marketing, sales, PR, customer service and technical support. Marketing can’t send an email to new contacts without existing clients knowing about it any more than customer service can expect customers who have had a bad brand experience not to talk to anyone. This calls for a much higher degree of planning and coordination of communications than Middle East businesses have been used to. And businesses are scared.

The good news: you don’t need to be a wizard

However, as with many new trends, much of the fear, uncertainty and doubt felt by business about Web 2.0 and Internet marketing is due to a lack of knowledge. Sadly, the online industry doesn’t help itself much here. Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t need to be a member of the magicians union to know what PPC, PPV, CTR or CPC are, you don’t need a special qualification to use Google Analytics and there’s no secret handshake required to become a social media marketer! In fact, your organisation probably already has much of the expertise required to plan, execute and manage a successful online communications campaign, because the central and most important consideration in this campaign should be your customers and other important key audiences.

Coming late to the party also has its benefits. Organisations across the region can now learn from a wealth of knowledge, example campaigns and online case studies from around the world whilst developing their own online campaigns. Furthermore, many brands, across many business sectors still have the opportunity to be first movers in developing online campaigns for their particular markets.

Introducing Digimedia.ME

Spot On PR is supporting a first-time conference next month called Digimedia.ME. The conference was born out of an idea to showcase and help explain the range of online communications disciplines to the business community. We’re excited about Digitmedia.ME, because a real effort has been made to rope in many different voices from the region’s online business community and the cost of attending has been kept very affordable, making it easy for business people to attend. So, if you want SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, brand protection, online PR or brand monitoring demystified, we hope that you’ll join us there.

Spot On Public Relations is a supporting partner of Digimedia.ME 2010. Digimedia takes place in Dubai on 5th and 6th May 2010. See the Digimedia.ME website for more information: http://www.digimedia.me

It’s only when starting to write a summary like this that one realises just how much there is to tell and how much Internet and media habits are changing across the region. O’Dwyer’s generously allowed my 1,400 words to write my report, but it really was a challenge trying to cram it all in!

You can read the digital edition of April’s O’Dwyer’s Magazine here:
O’Dwyer’s Magazine – April 2010

Thanks to Ben Lorica Senior Analyst at O’Reilly Research for allowing me to use their Facebook charts to illustrate my report.

Disclosure: Spot On PR also advertised in the April issue of O’Dwyer’s Magazine . We dealt with O’Dwyer’s advertising team on the advertisement and separately with O’Dwyer’s editor regarding covering the Arab world in this issue. However, as pointed out by @rupertbu on Twitter, I can’t tell you with certainty what, if any, influence our advertising had on the treatment of my editorial submission. We previewed Spot On PR’s advertisement in O’Dwyer’s to our Twitter and Facebook followers last week, but I see now that I should have mentioned our advertisement in this blogpost also. Thanks to Rupert Bumfrey for pointing this out!

Summary

It’s now well publicised that the rapid growth Twitter experienced during 2008 and the first months of 2009 slowed dramatically towards the end of 2009, although ending the year with 75 million user accounts. Twitter activity, on the other hand, grew from 5,000 tweets per day in 2007 to 300,000 by 2008 and 2.5 million tweets per day in 2009. Figures released by Twitter in February 2010 registered 50 million tweets per day (or an average of 600 tweets per second). No such figures are available for the Middle East & North Africa, but activity on Twitter has visibly increased over the past year and overall user numbers have also grown. Spot On estimates that there are currently 35,000-40,000 registered Twitter users in the region compared with a mere 3,000 users in March 2009.

Corporate activity in the MENA Twittersphere has grown too, with an estimated 400 brands represented on Twitter in the region including companies, government departments, NGOs and non-profit organizations (more than 300 can be tracked via Spot On’s Middle East Brands Twitter List). Spot On Public Relations conducted the first major MENA Twitter habits and demographics survey in August 2009. In light of the growing commercial interest in Twitter and social media in the MENA region, Spot On carried out a customer service and Twitter survey in February 2010. About 1,000 active Twitter users across the region were invited to take part in the survey and 174 users completed the survey in its entirety.

Key Findings

— 95% of respondents welcomed brand engagement via Twitter

— 87% of those surveyed said that Twitter had affected their perception of a brand or company (up from 61% in our August 2009 survey)

— 50% of those surveyed had received customer service via Twitter

— 50% of the survey had purchased a product or service as a result of Twitter

— 65% of respondents were interested in receiving special offers & coupons from brands on Twitter

— 82% admitted a preference for brands that they knew via Twitter that affected their purchasing

— 88% of those surveyed said that they would recommend a brand based on their experience on Twitter

All respondents were also asked to give one piece of advice to brands using Twitter. 101 Twitter users out of 174 contributed advice from their experience on Twitter. We highly recommend any brand that is using Twitter or considering using Twitter to read their advice in the survey report.

You can follow Spot On PR on Twitter via @spotonpr

Survey Downloads

The report: 101 things brands should know about Twitter (PDF)

Twitter and customer service survey press release (English, Word doc)

Twitter and customer service survey press release (Arabic, Word doc)

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101 things brands should know about Twitter by Spot On Public Relations is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Want to read more?

If you liked reading this post about Twitter, you might also like:

Tweets like grains of wheat

5 reasons Spot On PR uses Twitter

The uninvited guest at the party

Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey (2009)

For many of us in the Middle East, we started using Twitter this way too. Twitter has been great for following what people are up to and, for the most part, those that we have a business interest in finding out about, learning from or keeping in contact with. In early 2009, when Twitter had just 1,000-2,000 users across the whole region it was the business social network users that were there first (and excited about the prospect of discovering more business contacts!). Well, one year on, things have got a great deal more ’social’. With some 30,000-40,000 Twitter users across the Middle East and North Africa (Spot On’s estimate), there seem to be many more people these days that use Twitter day-to-day for their social lives (read Eman Hussein’s ‘Life without Twitter?’). Tweetups and other offline gatherings have been springing up all over the region, bringing together people with shared interests, introducing new connections and putting faces to Twitter handles.

2010 has already seen tweetups held all over MENA including Jordan, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, plus GeekFestBeirut in Lebanon. These meetups happen for many different reasons at different types of venue, both as public open invite events and private gatherings. GeekFest Beirut, held on Friday February 5th at the Art Lounge in Beirut (see Alexander McNabb’s report on FakePlasticSouks ) drew about 120 people to socialise, talk geek and listen to geek speakers. On the same day in the Sultanate of Oman, 45 tweeps gathered at Muscat’s Indian Embassy to meet visiting Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Dr. Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor on Twitter, read Digital Oman for a full report), who now seems to have penciled in a Dubai tweetup for sometime in the near future. On Saturday January 30th a group of more than 30 Jordanian Twitter users met at Wild Jordan in Jabal Amman to meet ‘the faces behind the tweeps’ (see full report on Under My Olive Tree) and there have been at least two more Amman tweetups since! Meanwhile, more than twenty tweeps met at the Riyadh Tweetup on February 2nd. Organisers are now looking at bigger venues to hold a Riyadh Tweetup on the first Monday of every month.

As one of the volunteer organisers for the first Twestival Dubai held in February 2009 (by the way the next Twestival Dubai takes place on March 25th), which followed a month after the first ‘big’ tweetup in Dubai organised by @rida, I remember the air of mystery that used to surround organising a tweetup. Many were unsure of the etiquette (or twettiquette!) involved in hosting a tweetup. Many, also, were used to keeping ‘online friends’ and ‘real friends’ compartmentalised, never mixing the two, and never meeting the former! Now is seems Twitter has helped bring the walls down and people are more comfortable inviting people to an event over Twitter than they are over the telephone. People are inviting other people that they would normally have considered to be ’strangers’ to meet and socialise all over the region, making new contacts and yes, even friends.

Summary

2009 has been a big year for Twitter with the micro-blogging platform’s rate of growth rocketing up to more than 20% per month and now showing annual growth of 1,460 percent (June 2008 to June 2009) according to Comscore. Although it’s still early days for Twitter in the Middle East and North Africa, Twitter is now growing fast and the numbers of Twitter users in the Middle East and North Africa is now increasing at a rate of 17% per month. The MENA Twitter community overall has increased ten times over the first seven months of 2009.

Spot On Public Relations has been active on Twitter since August 2008,  has been tracking Twitter usage in the MENA region  and, in the absence of any data on the region’s Twitter growth or demographics, has been conducting its own research. This report is the result of the region’s first extensive Twitter usage survey which focuses on the demographics, Twitter habits and experiences of a sample of 216 registered Twitter users across the Middle East and North Africa.

Here are some of the MENA Twitter Survey’s key findings:

— 54% of respondents are following 100 – 499 other Twitter users

— 53% of users surveyed have 100 – 499 followers

— 35% of Twitter users tweet 2-5 times per day

— 64% typically tweet every day of the week

— Contrary to global trends, twice as many men in our Middle East and North Africa survey use Twitter than women (other surveys show a similar male bias on Facebook in MENA)

— 99% of those surveyed tweet in English, 26% tweet in Arabic

— Only 50% of Arabic speakers tweet in Arabic

— 39% tweet mainly with other Twitter users in the Middle East

— 61% of MENA Twitter users surveyed say that Twitter has affected their perceptions of a brand

— 70% of MENA Twitter users say they have formed a more positive perception of a brand due to Twitter and 52% say that they have formed a more negative perception of a brand due to Twitter

— 48% of users surveyed say that they have often been alerted to a major story via Twitter, 54% say that Twitter has lead them to a blog or website and 21% say that they have tuned into a TV program as a result of Twitter

— 32% of users say that they have bought a product or service as a result of recommendations on Twitter

— 96% of users expect to continue to use Twitter as much as they do today or even more in the future

Survey Downloads

Middle East & North Africa Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey (PDF)

MENA Twitter Survey Press Release (English, Word doc)

MENA Twitter Survey Press Release (Arabic)

Bookmark this page to keep updated with new downloads on the survey

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Middle East & North Africa Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey by Spot On Public Relations is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.spotonpr.com/menatwittersurvey/.