Why Facebook is world’s fastest-growing ‘continent’

Louis Otieno, the general manager for Microsoft in Eastern and Southern Africa struck a very interesting chord in the first Chief Information Officers (CIOs) Breakfast meeting last week.

While making his presentation on “the technology trends to watch in 2010” he said Facebook, the social networking tool is the latest continent, albeit virtual.

Why does he say that?

He said Facebook has over 400 million users, 70 per cent of these are outside the US.

This number is larger than the US population standing at about 309 million.

Interestingly this new continent has a very high population growth rate that sees nearly 20 million people becoming fans of pages each month.

Mr Otieno’s message to the CIOs was that they needed to leverage on the customers that this new continent brings; they need to develop systems that can harness the potential of the inhabitants of this new continent who play with a different set of rules.

I thought this was a really interesting and thought provoking angle on the whole social networking arena.

There are a lot of people on Facebook and other social networking sites in Kenya today.

Numbers are hard to come by but I get multiple invites of friends in Facebook, Twitter, and Linked every single day.

Not many of the local social networking users have built business ideas around them, but I can see efforts to do so especially from the marketing and media companies.

At least all the big advertising companies in Nairobi have a social networking arm.

Business owners around the world are beginning to see this new marketplace.

They are pulling in new clients, servicing current clients, and making money through the use of Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.

This attention to new technology greatly increases the image of the brand, provides faster and more effective service, and allows for a high-level of targeted marketing.