How Egyptians Are Using Social Media [Report]
Inspired by the Egyptian Revolution on January 25, 2011, startup 25trends released their first report today on social media trends in Egypt, looking at Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube conversations.
Founder Karim Ouda created 25trends in 2011 as a way to monitor and analyze conversations on social media around specific topics, including celebrities, politicians, elections, or consumer brands.
While individuals can use the free version to search publicly available topics on social media, the service is mostly designed for companies that want to understand what their audience is talking about on social media and how its product is viewed. Currently, between 3,000-6,000 users use the fully-automated analytics package every month.
Ouda mentions that the reporting is around
75% accurate, offering data for 3 broad attitudes – positive,
negative, and neutral. Despite some inaccuracy, the general readout
on a country’s disposition can still be useful.
With such active engagement on social media,
especially in Egypt, Ouda hopes to expand the appetite for data in
the region. “The market is still not aware of the importance
of social media analytics,” he says. “People are focusing now on
the enterprise level, but the Egyptian revolution was planned and
executed on social media. If you were using data analysis at the
time, you would be able to predict that something would
happen."
The attached report is their first release, detailing Egypt’s social media trends from December 2012. Here are some of the major takehomes:
- The overall “mood” on Social Media in Egypt was Negative in December.
- 80% of Egyptians write in Arabic on Social Media.
- Peak activity hours on Social Media in Egypt are between 8 and 11 pm.
- Twitter has a special peak between 1 and 3 am every day.
- More Egyptian users access Twitter through smartphones than web browsers.
- Egyptian Twitter users own blackberry phones more than Android or iPhones.
- @ElBaradei is the top Egyptian influencer on Twitter for December 2012.
- On Facebook, the first 8 minutes and last 20 minutes of each hour have the most activity.
- The top conversation topics in December 2012 were “Morsy”, “Constitutional Referendum”, “Muslim Brotherhood”, and “Revolution”.