South Africa added 3.8 million social media users last year. FMCG brands haven't got the memo.
South Africa was home to 29.1 million social media user identities in October 2025. That is 44.9% of the population, and 64.8% of every adult over 18. In twelve months the number grew by 3.8 million, up 15.2%.
Now open TikTok and count how many South African FMCG brands you see in an hour of scrolling. I did. The answer was two, and one of them was an ad I skipped.
I'm 23, and I work as the new business development manager for an influencer marketing agency called Tribeez Social. I sit inside the exact audience these brands say they want to reach. So when I look at how SA's FMCG giants show up on social, I keep coming back to a framework I learnt about at university: diffusion of innovations, by the sociologist Everett Rogers. Rogers mapped how any new idea spreads through a population, from innovators through to laggards. Sixty-four years later, his bell curve describes the South African FMCG social landscape almost perfectly.
The Innovators
These brands treat social media as a culture channel. Savanna is the obvious example. "Siyavanna" wasn't a campaign that lived on social, it was born there, built on SA humour and the way we actually talk to each other. KOO gets it too. Other notable examples are Sunlight, Dr Oetker and Liqui-Fruit.
What sets these brands apart: they actively participate in South African internet culture, they move at the speed of the timeline, and they let creators carry the message. They've worked out that on social, entertainment is the entry fee.
The Early Majority
This is the biggest group, and if you manage an FMCG brand you probably recognise yourself here. The Instagram grid is polished. The content calendar is full. There's a post for Heritage Day, a product shot on Tuesdays, a competition every quarter.
The problem is that adoption of the platform is not the same as adoption of the culture. The early majority brands have a following. The innovators have an active audience. When your content could run as a print ad without changing a word, you're using 2010 logic on a 2026 feed. The engagement numbers tell the story: thousands of followers, twelve likes.
The Laggards
Then there are the brands your gran has bought for forty years. Massive shelf presence, real brand love, and a Facebook page last updated when loadshedding was front page news. Worst of all, some have no TikTok presence at all.
Here's what worries me about this group: their brand equity was built through TV and radio, on a generation that is now sharing the trolley with mine. I have never bought anything off a billboard. Brands earn a spot on my shortlist through comment sections, creator content, and how they make me feel. A laggard brand isn't losing the social media game. It isn't in the stadium.
Why this matters now
Rogers' insight was that the gap between adopter groups compounds. Innovators don't just get there first, they set the norms everyone else has to catch up to.
And the ground is still moving. Those 3.8 million new user identities in a single year are not a mature, settled market. They are millions of fresh feeds being shaped right now by whoever shows up in them. In SA at the moment, the innovators are buying cultural relevance at a discount while the rest of the category pays premium rates for attention on channels their customers have already left.
The good news is that the curve is a choice, not a sentence. Early majority brands are one brave brief away from innovator territory. Even laggards have an advantage: decades of brand love waiting to be translated into a language the feed understands.
This is the work we do every day at Tribeez Social. So if you're reading this and quietly placing your brand on the curve, my DMs are open.
Source: DataReportal, Digital 2026: South Africa. Social media user identities as at October 2025; growth measured against late 2024. Note that "user identities" counts accounts rather than people, because platforms cannot be reliably de-duplicated against one another.
