Unavoidable. For a company, turning digital today is unavoidable. Even if Madagascar is still in a full process of digitalization today, that process has been accelerated by the Covid-19 crisis and the lockdown. It has been noticed that the number of people using the internet worldwide has grown to 4.54 billion, an increase of 7 percent (298 million new users) compared to January 2019. These statistics have been published by Hootsuite and We are social in the frame of the Global digital overview. We do not have clear statistics about the increase of the use of internet and social networks in Madagascar. However, we noticed that the number of users has increased a lot since March 2020, since the beginning of the lockdown in the Big Island. In fact, even if the Covid-19 crisis had a lot of negative impacts, it brought a lot of unexplored opportunities, and still does. A call to all riskers!

An opportunity for any online businesses

It is difficult to see the end of this dark tunnel related to Covid-19 right now, whether in the world or in Madagascar. However, we can clearly see that the pandemic presents a lot of opportunities in the digital field.

For my part, as a digital entrepreneur, I found that lockdown was a great opportunity to launch any online businesses, mostly on social networks like Facebook, which is the most used social network in Madagascar, with more than 2 million people active on it until now, according to Facebook statistics.

Online trainings and courses, online shops, and many businesses such as delivery services, online restaurants, book shops, decoration stores, etc, were all born in March 2020, during the lockdown, and still generate a lot of income since then.

Explosion of digital marketing on social networks

One of the most successful businesses in Madagascar was digital marketing, which has shown up a lot of great potential and unexplored ways for selling. For example, the users of Facebook ads saw a growth of 75%, according to the Book News Madagascar statistics, a digital agency and information blog. Influence marketing has also met a growth, with the birth of many Malagasy influencers such as Chef Rija, Damima, the couple Izahay roa kely. This trend still goes on for now and gets bigger everyday. On the one hand, the number of followers of Malagasy influencers does not stop increasing. On the other hand, companies are starting to get familiar with the field. It is because influencers are way more affordable than traditional media but have better impact.

Apart from that, we cannot talk about the digital explosion of the social network TikTok around the world, with a penetration rate of 19,8% in 2020, against 10,8% in 2019, according to eMarketer. The institution predicts a rate of 26% in 2024. There are no clear statistics for Madagascar so far. Anyway, we can say that young Malagasy people are enjoying TikTok, as it is a way to have fun with a lot of functionalities: dancing, singing, acting, and to promote the Malagasy culture: quizzes, challenges, games… Malagasy influencers and companies also adopted that strategy. Some of them already use TikTok for Business.