Mxit Brand Index: 30 November 2013

Top 40 South African brands on Mxit on 30 November 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: new entry on the Mxit Brand Index for Kaizer Chiefs and ongoing campaigns, great content and app management continue to yield big subscriber numbers for top Mxit brands.

Entering the Mxit Brand Index at position 31, Kaizer Chiefs' newly-published app brings engaging, real-time information to their 209,104 subscribers. These features include news, match reports, live match updates and opportunities for fans to vote for the 'Man of the Match'.

With 270,610 new subscribers in November alone, Idols SA was a star performer in its final month of the competition. The intense media focus enabled Idols SA to jump to 5th position from 15th place in October.

Samsung, KFC, 1Life and Vodacom's continued ad campaigns, product and content offerings proved successful for these brands, notably delivering 67,831 new subscribers for Samsung and 64,304 new subscribers for KFC. Vodacom brought 36,096 new subscribers onboard with their campaign, and 1Life in turn added 7,901 new subscribers.

Two interesting points to note this month: it's easy to be complacent when you're in top position, but top media brand SuperSport breaks this mould by keeping their app up to date with engaging content. They added 4,867 new subscribers, increasing their lead on 2nd-placed brand 24.com. Woman Online is another success story where consistent quality updates, engaging content and incentives for users such giveaways, polls and competitions delivers thousands of new subscribers, month on month. In November, Woman Online added 2,173 new subscribers.

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?

A list of all apps on Mxit is compiled, and each one is ranked according to the 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 apply the following criteria:

• Working app with updated information

• No services-based apps and games such as MxPx, Judgeme, Battletrivia, Wikipedia, Hello Doctor, etc.
• No individual celebrities such as Romy Titus, Riaad Moosa, etc.

• No chat rooms