Facebook tops mobile internet statistics in Africa

Opera Software has released its monthly State of the Mobile Web report, and this month focused on the growth of the mobile web browsing in Africa.

The report looks at the usage of Opera Mini across 53 African countries in the past 12 months. One clear trend in the report is that Facebook.com tops mobile browsing using the Opera Mini in Africa.

Facebook.com is the number 1 visited website in all but 8 Africa countries (Algeria, Angola, Central Africa Republic, Egypt, Eritrea, Guinea and Mali), where Google.com tops.

Facebook was in recent months rumoured to be looking to buy Opera as many saw a common thread of expansion into emerging markets driven by the rapid adoption of mobile phones. The rumour eventually died down.

Opera has however been incorporating some social features into its Opera Mini browser lately like enabling users to see all their Facebook and Twitter updates on the default page of the browser and not need to visit Facebook or Twitter.

Twitter.com, the globally popular micro-blogging social networking service is also quite popular on the continent making it into the top 10 most visited sites via the browser in almost half of the countries.

Twitter is particularly popular in Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Lesotho and Madagascar where it’s in the top 5.

Here are other notable trends revealed by the Opera report:

 Nokia handsets dominate the top ten charts for mobile handsets using the Opera Mini browser in Africa.
   
The Northern Europe based mobile social network called Eskimi is becoming very popular.
   
Across Africa, data growth seems to outpace page-view growth, suggesting that Africans are browsing larger pages and most likely, using richer, more advanced websites.
   
36 countries more than doubled their Opera Mini user bases in one year.
   
25 out of 53 countries (47 percent) have international news sites as the most popular news source. Countries include Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Libya and Côte d’Ivoire. 18 of those 25 countries turn to the BBC as the most-used source.

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