Social Media Week Lagos 2019

Twitter, which uses Microsoft's Bing translation app, properly indexes only the following 3 African indigenous languages - KiSwahili, Afrikaans and Malagasy. In a continent of more than 2 100 spoken languages and the top 10 of which are spoken by tens of millions of Africans, it is baffling that only 3 are recognised by this microblog. The correct indexing of Africa's most dominant language spoken by more than 100 million people - KiSwahili - and is also the most tweeted according to our analysis, only happened at the beginning of May 2018.

In the midst of all this, Twitter's growth has been in the doll drums since quarter 1 of 2015, according to Statista. Between then and quarter 3 of 2018, the microblog's growth has been a paltry 8%, from 302 million to 326 million. Compare that to Facebook's growth that was 58% - from 1 441 000 to 2 271 000 - for the same period!

During this session we'll explore how Twitter can partly unlock the sluggish growth by indexing additional African indigenous languages. This will be backed by stats and facts, using Facebook as a benchmark.