Mxit Brand Index: 31 October 2013

Top 40 South African brands on Mxit on 31 October 2013

Top mobile brand: Cell C
Top banking brand: FNB
Top financial services brand: 1life
Top sporting brand: Nike Football
Top media brand: SuperSport
Top retail brand: Spar

Analysis: Vodacom debuts on the Mxit Brand Index; Idols shows expected growth and active campaigns continue to deliver for brand on Mxit.

Vodacom enters the brand index at position 39 after growing their community by 50,298 subscribers, to a total of 148,537, on the back of their High 5 campaign. The phenomenal 51% growth proves that a great campaign can deliver the goods.

As with any digital platform, brands need to maintain their communities following the onboarding of large volumes of new subscribers by offering ongoing opportunities for engagement. It will be interesting to see how Vodacom performs on the brand index in the coming months, and if they will challenge Cell C's position as top mobile brand, in 9th overall position.

Idols SA's Mxit app grew by 138,840 subscribers in October, resulting in a massive jump from 29th to 15th position on the brand index. Idols SA always performs well while the show is running, due to the on-air promotion of the app and the Mxit voting platform. Mxit also offers the most cost-effective way to vote for contestants, a vote on Mxit costs 25 Moola (25 cents), versus the premium-rated SMS voting offered by mobile operators, which costs viewers R1,50 per vote.

KFC's continued campaigns see them reaping rewards as they break through into the Top 20 brands, with 70,228 new subscribers added to their Mxit app.

Other top performers who ran successful campaigns include fashion brand LEGiT, technology brand Samsung and retail brand PEP, all showing significant growth in their subscriber numbers.

Mxit's Brand Index reveals the top 40 brands in South Africa on the Mxit platform.

What is the Mxit Brand Index?

The Mxit Brand Index is a measure of consumer affinity expressed by the number of Mxit users that subscribe to each brand on the social network. Mxit has a monthly active user base of 6.5-million in South Africa.

How is it compiled?

We draw up a list of all apps/ pages on Mxit, and rank them according to total number of subscribers. By subscribing to an app, a Mxit user has chosen to add the app to his contact list, can access content published by the app, and has opted in to receive direct messages from the app.

Listing Rules

• A brand has to exist as a commercial consumer brand outside of the Mxit ecosystem in order to be in consideration for the Index.
• Apps have to be in a published state on the date that the list is compiled. No beta, unpublished or suspended apps are considered.
• Where a brand has sub-brands that appear on the list, only the highest listing will be included in the index.
• The Index lists brands. If the name of the app is different to the name of the brand, the name of the brand will be used for the index (e.g. app= love cricket, but will appear as Cricket SA on the Index.)
• No NGOs or NPOs are included.

Additional Criteria

When evaluating the top brands in the Mxit ecosystem of apps, games, content and communities, we applied the following criteria:
• Working app with updated information.
• Real world brand that exists outside of the Mxit ecosystem.
• No services-based apps and games such as MxPx, Judgeme, Moonbase, Battletrivia, Wikipedia, Hello Doctor, etc.
• No individual celebrities such as Romy Titus, Riaad Moosa, etc.
• No chat rooms.