Pinterest Overtakes Facebook As Most Popular Social Media Platform In Zimbabwe
Data from a global web statistics company, Statcounter, shows that Pinterest has overtaken Facebook as the most popular social media platform in Zimbabwe.
According to Statcounter, Pinterest overtook Facebook in July 2019. Pinterest now commands 41% of the social media market share and Facebook is at 34%.
It is not clear from the data what has caused the surge in Pinterest usage in the past several months. The data, however, shows that Facebook has been in constant decline since December 2018 and Pinterest has been rising from about the same time.
What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a social media website focused on “pinning” pictures to one’s profile and following pictures pinned by others. Regular visitors of the site and app find it useful for idea generation for this such as fashion, recipes, home decor, gardening and other such. It is more popular with women than men.
How does StatCounter compile its data?
StatCounter is a web analytics service which tracks over 2 million websites globally. Using these it’s able to harvest data about visitors like browser, operating system, screen resolution and what social media site they were on before they visited a site. More on how StatCounter’s methodology here.
That said, the data is to not be taken in an absolute sense but more as an indication of the general usage trends.
Why is WhatsApp not Included?
WhatsApp is not included in these stats and yet its a social media service too and it’s certainly the most popular in Zimbabwe. The reason is more about WhatsApp being harder track that the other sites.
What about the other African countries?
Africa
In the wider African continent, Facebook still rules. In July 2019, it still commanded a 67% market share, and Pinterest was a distant third with 8% share. Second it YouTube with 18%
South Africa
South Africa, however, mirrors the situation in Zimbabwe to an extent. Pinterest had a 47% market share and like Zimbabwe, also overtook Facebook (40%) in July (and it had done so several months before as well briefly). The third is also Twitter (8%) and then YouTube (3%) and so on.
More: StatCounter
