An analysis of Social Media use in The SADC region - 2014 - 2020 Measuring social media usage Individual SM platforms track their usage statistics in non-standard ways, and analyze and release these data pursuant to their corporate policies; it is difficult to make conclusions related to the crosscutting use of SM platforms in the aggregate at the neither national nor regional level. These data tracking factors can particularly be seen in platforms with different business models. SM platforms tend to promote estimates of the number of people who could potentially view shared content 30 . This metric, commonly known as ‘reach’ is computed using diverse methods and some are closely guarded, proprietary processes31. Measures of this type are vital to the advertising-driven business models of Facebook, but comparatively much less relevant to applications such as WhatsApp. Because this key data is available almost exclusively, processes which do not provide transparent methodology and are only relevant to some but not all applications, it illustrates the analytical difficulty faced by researchers and policy makers. For SM platforms that seek to broadcast content, such as Twitter find great value in measures such as ‘amplification’32 . This term refers to the onward sharing of social media content to other social groups than the original recipient. For applications such as Snapchat, which focuses more on the direct sharing of images with specified friends only, amplification is not a suitable measure of usage rates. In some cases, visiting a platform once a month constitutes the measure of ‘monthly active user’33, and is a generally accepted baseline. However, the measure ‘daily active user’ is viewed with significantly more value as an indication of the health and profitability of an application 34 . In general, more frequent access, and more sharing of original content, tends to indicate whether or not a social media network is growing or shrinking, healthy or fading35. Therefore, speaking of ‘social media’ use rates in a specific country over time is quite problematic36 . It must be noted that, not only do social networks change significantly over time; their records are subject to significant retroactive revision. According to analysis undertaken in 201837, variances can be observed in the reported inauthentic accounts reported by quarterly reports and the numbers of accounts actually removed. Taken together, these 30 https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1665333080167380?id=176276233019487 31 https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AudienceReachMeasurementGuidelines.pdf 32 https://www.gshiftlabs.com/social-media-blog/social-amplification-part-1-of-3-what-is-social-amplification/ 33 https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/monthly-active-user-mau.asp 34 https://www.vox.com/2019/2/7/18215204/twitter-daily-active-users-dau-snapchat-q4-earnings 35 https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/twitter-reports-another-decline-in-users-shifts-to-alternate-performance-m/547981/ 36 http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/06/how-facebook-is-trying-to-fix-itself.html 37 Source: New York Times (2019), Does Facebook Really Know How Many Fake Accounts it Has? 11 https://zimbabwe.misa.org