Kenya has long been at the forefront of ICT usage and innovation in Africa. While Nigeria and South Africa may lead the continent in terms of accesibility, data from Opera Mobile and other sources has shown Kenyans to be leaders in terms of per capita usage and amount of time spend online. This has been evident in the last few days as Kenyan topics have trended twice in the last seven days.Tuesday this week saw Kenyans attempting to come up with their own KCPE Questions and Answer on the microblogging site under the trendline #kcpe2010. The hash tag quickly rose to become a top 10 trending topic worldwide and went as far as to hold the number 3 position for several hours in the afternoon. Thursday was also another day that saw huge activity from the Kenyan tweeps, as at times they prefer to call themselves. This time round, as Ruto jetted to the Hague, Kenyans on Twitter were in an attempt to guess what music was playing on his iPod. This was in the form of the #rutoplaylist hashtag that went ahead to hold on for several hours as the third most trending topic.
 

Uptake of social media has been exponential over the last several months. Kenya's presumably first trending topics were #raila and #uhurupark which coincidentally happened during the promulgations of the country's new constitution on September 24th 2010. Comparatively , Nigeria also trended during their 50th anniversary celebrations, while Didier Drogba has been a regular feature on the trendline, though not necessarily due to input from Africa.
At the moment, Kenya seems to be the continental leader in terms of trending topic source in the last 3 months. Ronald Osumba, Safaricom's Sector Manager  Media , ICT & Education attributes this to the fact that its easier and cheaper to Tweet than send an SMS. However, while Osumba describes Twitter and Facebook as lifestyle applications, he says that the pick-up exhibited by youth is due to the two been fashionable.
Osumba says that he expects relevant local applications developed specifically for this market to be key drivers in terms of usage. He advises corporates looking to push their bands and get brand loyalty or follow should look to Twitter as a tool. Twitter's advantage is put as the flow of real time information. Top Kenyan brands on Twitter include Safaricom, Kenya Airways, AccessKenya. It is also important to note how Alykhan Satchu has developed himself into a powerful brand on Twitter.