First-ever Africa-wide blogger awards launched

First-ever Africa-wide blogger awards launched
Gareth van Zyl
By Gareth van Zyl, Editor, ITWeb Africa
26 Feb 2014

African bloggers, instagrammers, tweeters and YouTubers finally have a continent-wide awards programme to measure their popularity.

Entries for the first African Blogger Awards are open for the 2014 competition, which plans to measure online and social influencers’ reach through data analysis.

Organisers of the event say the awards have been divided into 36 categories, recognising reach in areas such as advice, fashion and beauty, events and nightlife, education, sports, politics, technology and gadgets, and youth culture.

Entries for the awards close on 9 March 2014 at midnight GMT+2, and results are planned to be announced on 16 April 2014 via the competition’s Twitter profile, @African_Blogger, from 11h00 GMT+2.

Meanwhile, overall awards for Africa’s ‘Top Blogger’, ‘Top Instagrammer’, ‘Top Tweeter’ and ‘Top YouTuber’ are expected to be announced on 18 April 2014 at an event in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Countries such as South Africa have blogger competitions such as the ‘SA Blog Awards’, but the organisers of the African Blogger Awards say this is the first continent-wide event of its kind.

“The African Blogger Awards are the first completely impartial, objective awards for online and social influencers on the African continent because winners will be determined by data analytics provided by Webfluential, and not through peer nominations,” says South Africa’s Mike Sharman, co-founder of the African Blogger Awards and co-founder of Webfluential.

Webfluential is an online tool linking brands to consumers through social influencers.

And this online tool is planned to be used to evaluate entrants, who are required to register their blog, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube profile on the Webfluential website.

Entrants have to have over 1,000 active and legitimate followers, according to a press statement.

Variables that entrants are to be judged on include reach, resonance and relevance.

Murray Legg, co-founder of the African Blogger Awards, says in a statement, “As the competition grows, we plan to host the awards ceremony in other cities on the African continent each year, in recognition of the enormous influence that the online community has on news, lifestyle, media and marketing across the continent.”

Organisers say in a press statement that the awards are expected to provide brands and the marketing industry a measurement of the most relevant online and social influencers to include in their campaigns on the continent.

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