According to one source, only a handful of African countries had Twitter users in mid-2007, whereas all but three (Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City) European nations had registered users on the site. Most African users were from either South Africa or Egypt, a statistic that mirrors Internet penetration rates across the continent. Of course, much has changed in the past 2+ years, but according to many current statistics, the numbers have not changed significantly. In reality, however, every African country is represented on Twitter. It’s just a matter of unintentional “Africa blindness” in the studies, since it’s up to the user to enter his or her location. Twitter users can enter a city, state, region, or nation, making geographic tracing quite difficult and time consuming. No one feels like spending the time searching for every possible town in every possible country, so the automatically retrieved data is incomplete.

Some interesting African Twitter findings from over the years:

• In 2008, an official Twitter blog post didn’t even include Africa in the international traffic statistics. However, the folks at Twitter acknowledged that the data was only compiled from web traffic and not SMS data.

• In the early days of Twitter, Africans utilized the service for its SMS capabilities. In fact, a blog post written by ‘Soyapi’ shortly after the launch of Twitter addresses this issue:
  

  So the launching of Twitter provides a good alternative considering that the use of mobile phones is much higher than that of computers. In Malawi for example, there are about 50,000 Internet users against about 700,000 mobile phone users out of a population of about 12 million. Twitter allows users to post a small update via SMS, instant messaging client and the web. Anyone who chooses to follow you will get that update on the Twitter home page, or their mobile phone of they choose to. Unlike most mobile phone web services, you can update via SMS from anywhere in the world and from virtually any handset.

  However, the nature of Twitter drastically changed for Africans in 2008 when the SMS feature was dropped. Even now, SMS mobile devices are more popular than IP-based access (and advanced phones with data plans) due to the relatively cheap cost of an SMS versus an ISP subscription. Africans who had relied on the SMS feature of Twitter had to find an alternative.

• A recent (Sept. 09)  list of “Top 10 Twitter Users of Each Country in the World” on TechXav.com only includes Egypt and South Africa from the African continent although numerous users exist in the other 50+ nations. TwitterScore.net’s Top Users by Location includes a few more African nations (19 to be exact), but again, is far from complete:
  

  Rank	Country Name	# of Twitter Users	AVG Followers per user	AVG Updates per user
  20	South Africa	302	1211	1671
  55	Egypt	29	1081	2754
  65	Morocco	24	248	1149
  71	Somalia	19	632	1143
  72	Kenya	13	3167	2129
  73	Nigeria	14	1145	1331
  74	Tunisia	12	3214	1011
  92	Ghana	5	2143	4825
  98	Tanzania	4	650	951
  99	Algeria	5	92	227
  103	Namibia	3	571	896
  105	Seychelles	2	1256	3944
  106	Sudan	3	701	2742
  109	Senegal	2	1076	377
  110	The Dem Rep of the Congo	2	322	1604
  111	Zimbabwe	3	45	248
  114	Ethiopia	1	240	1746
  118	Malawi	1	114	896
  119	Botswana	2	23	126

• In June 2009, Sysomos determined that 0.85% of Twitter users are located in South Africa. However, only 17 nations were included in the final report.

The outlook for Twitter in Africa is certain positive, since it can be used with either personal computer or mobile device and requires minimal data transfer to function. Even worldwide, most Twitter updates are made from mobile device – certainly a promising statistic for Africa. Additionally, the simplicity of the site prevents a language barrier from deterring potential users.