Social Media Evolution, Impact, and Top Online Influencers in Kenya

By Soko Directory Team / Published August 31, 2021 | 2:11 pm

KEY POINTS

Social media has grown beyond establishing and nurturing personal connections at scale. What began as a desktop/laptop experience has significantly shifted to mobile devices and tablets as cellular services and phone proliferation expanded.

Human’s impulse to communicate, stay in touch with the world, and the advances in technology, have had a profound effect on the evolution of social media. And in a little more than a decade, its impact has gone from being an entertaining extra to a fully integrated part of nearly every aspect of daily life for many.

Smartphone penetration, high-speed internet, and enabling tech, have become more readily available in homes, businesses, and public spaces. Incidentally, with the advent of social media apps that run on smartphones, end users have taken their communities with them wherever they went.

Amidst the craze, businesses took advantage of this new consumer mobility by serving their customers new, simpler methods of interacting — and new ways of buying goods and services.

ALSO READ: The World Redefined By The Ever-Changing Social Media Space

Social Media Impact on Businesses

The most notable impact of social media has been on marketing. It has been regarded as an instrumental strategy in bridging the gap between business and consumer, creating channels of communication, and helping businesses build lasting relationships with audiences.

Many companies now rely heavily on social media to shape their brand image, as consumer feedback is almost instantaneous. Due to the increased accessibility of people and resources within companies, it has also had an impact on recruitment practices, educational programs, and personal development opportunities within companies – all these have been expedited by the surge in online activity.

According to Hootsuite’s 2021 Digital Report, the number of internet users across the globe stood at 4.80 billion people by July 2021 – that’s almost 61 percent of the world’s total population. The number is still growing and in the past 12 months alone, 257 million new users came online.

Interestingly, internet users are currently growing at an annual rate of 5.7 percent, equating to an average of more than 700,000 new users each day.

The global social media users by July 2021 had reached 4.48 billion, equal almost 57 percent of all the people on Earth. The number of social media users has increased by 13.1 percent over the past 12 months.

ALSO READ: The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Database Marketing

The report further states that 520 million new users joined social media between July 2020 and July 2021, equating to growth of more than 1.4 million new users every day.

This increase in online connectivity has given businesses new ways to reach customers through content development and promotion. Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and TikTok are currently the most popular social networking networks.

Facebook is the number one most used social media site today with July numbers showing that the users had reached 2.853 billion people!

The Social Media End-User Experience

When it began, social media served to help end-users connect digitally with friends, colleagues, family members, and like-minded individuals they might never have met in person. But it began with desktop access which made it easy to grow free online communities without ever leaving the house.

Then smartphones came, and social media was liberated from the confinements of desktops and personal computers. The most popular social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn thrived in the mobile app environment.

Better advancements followed, thanks to improved cameras and performance capabilities of smartphones. On top of instant messaging, end-users could now broadcast in real-time.

Instagram became the app of choice for social media users interested in travel, entertainment, fashion, and other visually-oriented topics.

The Social Media Business Experience

With the growth of social media, companies moved online, and the business applications of Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms began to take shape. These sites provided easy access to some of the richest trackable user data ever conceived.

On top of placing ads on social media platforms, companies uncovered the potential utility of cultivating an active, engaged social media presence. The platform has grown to become a hub for businesses to:

Increase brand awareness
Generate leads and increase conversions
Develop and nurture relationships with customers
Learn from competitors

The combination of advertising, or paid social media marketing, with organic social media outreach, resulted in the digital marketing specialty known as social media marketing. This subsequently gave rise to influencer marketing.

ALSO READ: Micro-Influencers Are The Driving Force; Embrace Them Or Die

How Pros Utilize Social Media for Marketing

With the ability to reach consumers now expanded, marketing professionals were presented with measurement tools that provided unprecedented access to valuable, actionable data about consumers’ demographics, buying habits, and more – and that’s how influencer marketing was born.

As companies adjusted to leverage existing audiences, they began engaging social media “influencers” to share messaging and product offers with their followers.

An article on Sprout Social’s website defined influencer marketing as a “type of social media marketing that uses endorsements and product mentions from influencers — individuals who have a dedicated social following and are viewed as experts within their niche.”

These influencers help cut through the noise by targeting specific potential buyers. This helps build brand awareness among potential long-term customers, as well as for generating leads for specific products or services.

According to Business Insider, influencer marketing is likely to become a $15 billion industry by 2022. The customer acquisition rate and ROI from influencer marketing are remarkably impressive. Even though brands might calculate ROI differently, they all agree that influencer marketing truly works.

Amidst this projection, there is no denying that influencer marketing still plays a major role for businesses today – especially where thought leadership is concerned.

Thought Leadership in Social Media Marketing

Thought leadership is a common marketing term often regarded as a buzzword to describe any authority gained on a subject. The reality of the process, however, goes much deeper than that.

To become a thought leader, you must establish yourself or your firm as an expert in your field – the first place people turn to for answers, ideas, or analyses.

Sure, customers still want to hear about specific items, and promotional content will continue to grab attention and drive traffic and sales, but when a business is able to elevate its standing to that of a thought leader, it signifies that people are considering them as something other than a sales medium.

Thought leaders can build brand equity and consumers and other businesses usually end up looking up to them for answers and will trust what they have to say. This provides a terrific opportunity to share your views, and shape the conversation, which then creates more sustainable growth than a single product or concept. Through it all, social media offers the most direct access to consumers on the internet.

Influencer Marketing in Kenya

Influencer marketing in Kenya is one of the marketing areas that has risen from obscurity to the top of any marketing strategy in just the last decade.

Many businesses, big or small, are now engaging online influencers to push their product and brand awareness among target audiences. With over 90 percent of marketers utilizing influencers for promotion, this form of marketing has now become a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Interestingly, influencer marketing has completely moved beyond the idea of traditional endorsements by celebrities and sports stars into a modern-day content-driven marketing campaign driven primarily by online influencers.

These influencers build brands primarily through social networks, and they have categorized themselves into various niches. There are those who do fashion, others travel, other business aspects such as product promotion, to name a few.

Various audiences, however, follow influencers or thought leaders for different reasons. Others do so for entertainment whereas some follow them for expert ideas on a subject. That said, here are the top 50 digital influencers and trendsetters in Kenya.

Top Thought Leaders, Industry Experts, and Influencers in Kenya

There is no specific criteria used for the following ranking. They are solely the views of the writer and the popularity of the said persons online.

Thought Leaders/Business/Politics

Media

Lifestyle

Bloggers

Others

Of course, there are a lot of other thought leaders, industry experts, opinion shapers, and marketers not covered on this list. It is, however, worth noting that it is not the number of followers you have, that makes you an influencer, but the content you put out and how people interact with it.

Notably, when something is trending on Kenyan social media, at least one of these guys is responsible for the massive amount of attention the situation or story is receiving. Some of them are the go-to guys for brands looking to capitalize on digital marketing.

Following them ensures that you are always up to date on everything interesting that is happening in Kenya. These individuals are well-known enough to maintain their presence.

Most Active Corporates on Twitter

Influencers aren’t the only ones that have capitalized their presence online. As such, here are some of the most active corporates in Kenya on Twitter.

Despite a recent study that says Facebook is better with engagement than Twitter, these corporates have shown that is still vital for most companies to have a presence on other platforms such as Twitter as well.

About Soko Directory Team

Soko Directory is a Financial and Markets digital portal that tracks brands, listed firms on the NSE, SMEs and trend setters in the markets eco-system.Find us on Facebook: facebook.com/SokoDirectory and on Twitter: twitter.com/SokoDirectory

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