A few days back whilst winding down for the day, I took a quick look at my Twitter feed on Flipboard and discovered a tweet from Amanda Sevasti ‏@AmandaSevasti who tweeted that there are now 2,435,528 Twitter users in South Africa – that number has doubled since last year. (Sept 2012).

So, if you believe that Twitter is irrelevant in your market, think again.

In the same Twitter trends, I found a local session of the “Dispatch Dialogues”, a community interaction project held by East London based newspaper, The Daily Dispatch, was trending on Twitter.

Wow … local relevance.

So in a nutshell, whichever way you look at it, social media is gaining popularity and influence. Twitter is part of a group of new communications tools that people are using on a daily basis in South Africa and internationally.

As a business person you need to be aware that people are using new tools to communicate.

I know it’s scary to think we may have to participate, but do we have a choice. If our customers are ditching print media in favor of electronic media as a source of information we have to make the transformation and of course when we do, we need to do it properly.