Nigeria Numbers in Facebook Are Poor – Factor Population, Nigeria Has Low Facebook Per Density (FPD)

It is very common these days for everyone to praise Nigeria for its Facebook numbers. Yes, we are wasting more time on the social media site looking at ourselves when our kids cannot do their home works or we cannot focus on our jobs. We are trying to position those numbers to correlate with technology improvement. We feel good when the numbers jump every now and then. But unfortunately, Nigeria is one of the lowest Facebook adopting nations. Forget about what the journalists write, let us go a little academic work here.

Tekedia for this analyses has developed Facebook Per Density (FPD)- this is analogous to the Per Capita Income that is used by the developmental economists. In other words, while it makes great news that Nigeria add more people than Ghana, but when you account for the population differences and density, you will notice that Ghana is doing better than Nigeria on facebook. So, we divide all the numbers in Facebook for key African nations by their population to make it obvious that Nigeria is not doing that well.

Apply FPD for some selected Africans against their Facebook numbers (thanks Balancing Act for the Facebook numbers). This is done by dividing the Facebook numbers by the nation’s population. From some of the numbers below, Nigeria lags even Ghana and Kenya.  So, we are just covering with our population but when carefully evaluated, we are not even that big in Facebook because many more are out.

Egypt              6.58 million (pop. 82,999,393, FPD = 0.07)
Nigeria            2.9 million (pop 150m, FPD = 0.019)
Kenya             1.03 million (FPD = 0.025)
Ghana            906,540 (FPD = 0.04)

You will ask why? Simply, the rate of adoption is affected by ease of connecting online. Internet is very expensive in Nigeria and many more are out of the platform. So, next time they play those number games, tell them that when you are 1/5th of black race, you will surely be big, but the big question is what percentage or better what FPD is online?