SuperSport dominates social media in Africa

The 16^th annual Pamro conference, currently underway in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, has seen a large number of varied speakers presenting research that their organisations have done into media consumers. One such presenter was Oresti Patricios, CEO of the Ornico Group, who reviewed the results of the company’s inaugural Africa Brand Index. Michael Bratt takes a look at the data.

With the Rugby World Cup fast approaching advertisers are trying to find their place both on and off the field. The eyes of the world will be glued to all the action and it will be the prime time to get a product or service noticed. But the latest Africa Brand Index shows that there are many more opportunities for advertising linked to sports in Africa. And some brands are doing it right, while others need a push in the right direction. Patricios says “sporting brands are a religion, a movement, a cultural phenomenon… Big sports are not only big money, but a major part of people’s lives”.

The index revealed the brand  excelling most at brand engagement and reach on social media in Africa, SuperSport. The Naspers owned brand is tops in engaging content, social media performance, reach and likeability. Like SuperSport, the index reveals that broadcast media, particularly television brands, feature strongly in the top 10 brands listed in the African Brand Index. Patricios says, “This speaks to the strong influence of broadcast brands in Africa, and the rising phenomenon of multi-screening. This is a testament to social broadcast. Watching television or listening to radio is a communal endeavour, particularly in the youth markets.” Here are the top 20 brands in Africa:

Patricios says the brands at the top of the index “Are engaged, have good growth and good reach, and who offer relevant content that people want to see and interact with” and the aim of the index is to, “Give brands excellent insight into how to manage and maintain communities online, and to track how effective their content is.”

He added that during the creation of the index Ornico found a big problem with how content success online is measured through Advertising Value Equivalents (AVE). “AVE is a completely erroneous way of measuring reach, social media performance or a return on investment in public relations or marketing for a multitude of reasons,” Patricios said.

The reasons included no standard, agreed methodology for measuring AVEs, the fact that AVEs don’t reflect sentiment, and the fact that rate cards fluctuate and are not consistent. Patricios added that the index is important, “Because social media plays such a pivotal role in building brands, particularly as the digital increasingly makes up for the greater part of media consumption, it has become critical to accurately measure performance, and to do so in a way that benchmarks reach and frequency.”

For the index, Ornico pre-selected 500 of Africa’s top brands and then examined their profiles on the four biggest social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. Four criteria were used: growth, engagement, response, and sentiment. Patricios said in future the Index will include a country by country ranking of brands based on their social media performance as well as a celebrity section, where Africa’s top music, movie, small screen and sports personalities weigh up against each other, and to interrogate their influence.