How many Twitter users are there in South Africa? Fuseware just made available their latest SA Twitter report, which has some very interesting facts:

• Number of Active* SA Twitter users: 55000
• Monthly tweets from SA: 1.5 million
• Twitter web penetration: 4.5% of SA sites reference Twitter
• Twitter SA site popularity: 7th most visited website in SA
• Average Twitter followers for SA: 115
• Average friends for SA: 122
• Average total tweets per user for SA: 346
• Percent of protected accounts: 0.38%
• Percent of geo-location enabled accounts: 12.96%
• Percent of Twitter verified accounts: 0.014%
• People hardly use Twitter.com directly for posting tweets, with only 26% logging into the site to post updates.
• The most popular Twitter client is TweetDeck, with 10% of all SA tweeters using it.
• People hardly use Twitter.com directly for posting tweets, with only 26% logging into the site to post updates.The most popular Twitter client is TweetDeck, with 10% of all SA tweeters using it.
• SA mostly tweets at night, between 7 and 8 pm. Many also tweet first thing in the morning, and over lunch.
• Cape Town and Johannesburg are the most busy tweeters.

This is a pretty great report by the guys at Fuseware, with lots more info – so go download it here.

A joint effort by Cape Town Partnership and wi-fi hotspot provider Skyrove means that Capetonians will now be able to make use of free wireless internet at Greenmarket Square in the city centre.

Henk Kleynhans, CEO of Skyrove says, “Businesses on Greenmarket Square will see a significant increase in the number of people lingering in their establishments, as more locals will schedule meetings outside of the office – or linger over coffee – while they enjoy wireless internet in the cosmopolitan bustle of this 300-year old heritage space.”

The provision of free wi-fi will also certainly be of benefit to tourists, particularly those wanting to access data services on their smartphones while travelling.

The project will run for an initial six months, and individual users will be allocated 10MBs of free internet each day.

Terri Carter, Senior Project Manager at Cape Town Partnership, says promisingly, “We hope to roll out similar projects around the city very soon.”

Obox Design, a premium theme studio based in Hout Bay, Cape Town, has joined up with popular micro-blogging service Posterous to supply their users with a selection of themes. The Obox themes will be included in the official Posterous theme directory, and will all be free. Three themes are already available, with two more in the pipeline.

Themes now available
My.List, a visual theme suited to designers or photographers:

Mad Men, formerly known as Smoke & Tumble:

Post Press, formerly known as Micro.Press:

The two themes currently in development are Minimal (simple design with a clear focus on the content), and Wired Inspired (includes some subtle grunge elements). Read more about the partnership on the Obox blog.

Apple yesterday made public the dates for their annual WWDC conference. On June 7 you can expect Steve Jobs to grace the stage again to welcome developers for the Apple ecosystem. While it has been primarily concerned with development on the Mac platform in the past, in recent years the focus has been much more on the iPh0ne. While the conference deals primarily with app development, iPhone fans everywhere are also interested seeing as this is where Apple traditionally announces their new iPhone. Perhaps also a sneak peak at the next generation Mac OS X. Cougar? Or Feral Cat?

Unfortunately this year the hype will be a little more subdued, seeing as most tech lovers have already seen the pictures and specs of the next iPhone, but this is not to say that prototype was final…

Update: Turns out this WWDC will focus much less on desktop development than ever before.

The NetWeb business community is hosting a networking event this evening (28 April 2010) at the Southern Sun Hotel in Main Road, Newlands. There will be an hour of presentations on issues facing entrepreneurs, followed by an hour of networking.

Bruce Wade of The Entrepreneur Incubator will talk about becoming a “20-tweener” in order to understand the new rules of business engagement, while Peter Greenwall of Logical Stupidity will present on “Pulling Ideas From Your Aspirations For Financial Gain”. The cost to attend is R70 per person, and snacks will be provided. The event runs from 18h30 until 20h30.

Find out more about the event on the NetWeb site, and book your spot by emailing Pamela Tosh at pamela@pamelatosh.co.za.

We heard about this event via the Cape Town Startup Digest. Join the Startup Digest mailing list to make sure that you don’t miss out on any startup and tech-related events taking place in Cape Town.

Facebook has begun expanding the reach of its “Like” feature a little more, by sending out customised printed “Like” stickers to a certain number of businesses who have existing fan pages on the social network.

These window decals give the company’s Facebook fan page URL, as well as instructions for “liking” the business instantly via SMS. Included with the customised sticker is a letter offering a few tips for having a successful Facebook fan page, as well as a coupon code good for $25 worth of Facebook advertising.

This is a pretty smart and inexpensive way for Facebook to – amongst other things – grow their user base even further by getting other businesses to do their advertising for them, ensure that businesses use Facebook consistently to communicate with their customers, and introduce small businesses to the Facebook advertising platform.

Digital Cowboys is a monthly get-together held in Cape Town, and is open to anyone involved in the online marketing and digital advertising industry. The next event is happening on Wednesday 28 April at Café Chic (7 Breda Street, Gardens), from 4 to 7pm.

For any other information, you can contact Sean Riley on 021 467 8900.

Visit the Digital Cowboys website to read about past events.

Guest post written by Marc Aston

Marc is always looking for ways to help bloggers monetise their content and are constantly exploring different advertising networks to see which generates the best return.

Initially we were reluctant to try out EasyAds from OfferForge as we were under the impression that it was little more than a rotating banner offering. However after taking a bit of time to further explore the offering and roll it out on a variety of our blogs, we have been quite impressed.

While we are relatively new to OfferForge, we’ve had our most successful month yet with converted leads and sales being credited to our account.

In a nutshell EasyAds displays three text adverts with thumbnails in a banner. Bundublog has been using the 468X60 and 160X300 sizes.

In theory the ads are supposed to “learn” which are the better performing campaigns and serve more of these to your blog. This will serve any of 50 plus adverts to the banner offering bloggers opportunities to monetize from pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale or pay-per-click campaigns.

As far as click through ratios (CTR) go, we have seen this improve to 0.78% from 0.68%.

For context, our CTR from OfferForge competitor TrafficSynergy is around 0.75%, but conversions from TrafficSynergy have been significantly lower than that of OfferForge.

The improved CTR we attribute to the text format which we think reduces some of the “banner blindness” that image only banners experience.

On the negative side we have picked up a couple of typo’s in the text ads which are glaringly obvious and need to be rectified. We are also not convinced that EasyAds is yet serving the most contextual ads to suit the blog content – e.g. on a financial blog we will see fashion and lifestyle products being advertised.

On the whole though, we believe that Easy Ads has been a positive revenue generator for some of the blogs on our platform.

About the reviewer

Marc Ashton runs Bundublog.com a free blogging platform aimed at the African continent. Apart from Bundublog, Marc’s company owns a number of industrial titles aimed at the education, metals and manufacturing industries.