Why social media freedom matters

Looking back 14 years ago to 2005, most of us could not imagine the impending dramatic shift in the trajectory of our lives and the alteration in the way we interact with the world.

In 2005 email had already been in wide use for over a decade. Media firms such as Nation Media Group, BBC, and CNN operated news websites for over five years. Blackberry smartphones brought emails right to users’ handsets.

But the concept of social media had only entered its nascent form. MySpace only began in 2003, Facebook in 2004, and YouTube and Reddit in 2005, but none had yet proliferated. Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and Pinterest were all still months and years away.

But by 2019, the United Nations and big technology companies claim that a staggering 45 per cent of the world’s population is active on social media. Inasmuch, social media commentator Christina Newberry estimates that over 90 per cent of companies use social media to improve brand awareness.

Many Kenyan firms now even interact with and transact business through social media including utility companies, big innovative banks, insurance companies, telecommunications firms, and many government offices more effectively than in European and North American countries.

Researchers Niels Lund, Scott Cohen, and Caroline Scarles highlight the sheer power of social media. Companies used to control the public narrative about their brands through advertising. Now, firms can publicise and promote on social media, but they are no longer in control of their narrative.

Social scientists Shirley Leitch and Elizabeth Merlot show that social media caused significant disruption to companies and required them to become much more responsive to customer demands and inquiries. Hyunmin Lee, Katie Place, and Brian Smith even found that social media flattened the power imbalance between men and women in the marketing and public relations space.

Meanwhile outside the digital space, Nairobi County survives as one of the only places in the world where every brochure, flyer, poster, and paper handed out in public or hung up must get county approval, stamp, and pay a fee.

Entrepreneurs express significant frustration at the bureaucratic hurdles to marketing. Also, unlike the rest of the world, entrepreneurs cannot legally collect data on their customers through physical paper or online surveys without the burdensome and costly National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation approval.

So with the 2.38 billion active monthly users on Facebook alone, not surprisingly entrepreneurs can enlist social media to reach their exact highly targeted and specific customer segment and avoid government bureaucracy that burdens other marketing avenues. But some government overregulation, non-existent in almost all other non-communist countries, threatens to upend social media freedoms in Kenya such as the stalled murky controversial ICT Practitioners Bill and the Kenya Film Classification Board’s overreach to YouTube uploads.

Nonetheless, social media now dominates the Kenya entrepreneurship landscape. During surveys and focus groups, entrepreneurs tend to find Facebook for the general population followed by Instagram for the young upmarket consumer the most useful to sell products and personal services. Professional services tend to fare better on LinkedIn, according to focus groups.

News organisations, bloggers, and politicians seem to utilise Twitter as an effective platform far more than entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs often report YouTube as the least helpful advertising partner due to the large bundles required to use the platform.

Additionally, social media platforms lower the start-up costs and shorten processes for Kenya’s entrepreneurs. Instead of setting up shops and kiosks, entrepreneurs can launch with low expenses, work out of home, and sell products and services directly to the public. Small business owners fed up with terrible payment terms of big distributors or grocery store chains go directly to their market and deliver to customer homes. Social media empowers the entrepreneur to get their messages channelled directly to consumers.

In honour of the launch of the US Embassy-funded Social Media Consumption in Kenya Report today at the Incubation and Innovation Center at USIU-A and recognising Kenya as a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity, innovation, and growth, let us keep our nation a shining beacon of freedom of expression and social media usage. It exponentially multiplies the economic power that our entrepreneurs bring into our economy.