Friday 1 June 2018

Selling your Product or Services to Nigerians on 5 Social Media Platforms



Facebook

Facebook started operation giving users enough space to post pictures and add captions, creating a timeline of events in their lives. Things have progressed amazingly for the platform, now anybody can start a live video and connect with their friends. As time goes by, new developments in the platform makes the kind of content that appeal to the users vary.

Facebook has over 17 million users in Nigeria and 97% of these users access the platform from their mobile phones and 75% spend 20 minutes Facebook every day. In Nigeria, Internet connection is relatively slow and prices of data plans are high, most users would not stream videos of their friends, let alone video ads.

This means if you are trying to market your brand to Nigerians on Facebook, it is better you use image ads with captions and sometimes carousel ads (spinning images). Facebook is an amazing platform for businesses as there are all demographics of people on Facebook. All you need do is create a page for your business, create an amazing post, and boost it (drive it with money) to get followers (through likes) who may become your customers and ultimately revenues for you.

Example of a Carousel Ad, Images come into view one after the other.

Twitter

Twitter started with a character limit of 140 but that was doubled for almost all the languages of the world. Twitter serves as a search network where users can get news on their object of interest, when users search; they get tweets and mention of that object within the hour, day or week. Users tweet texts with jpg or gif image formats or embedded videos or links. This makes twitter the best platform to give news about your brand and conduct proper and timely customer service.

Twitter has up to 7 million users in Nigeria and the tweets from Nigeria are the second highest in Africa. You can create a hashtag unique for your business and use it in your marketing to help people find your company and the conversations around it. Just like boosting posts Facebook, you can promote your tweet with money to reach more people including people who do not follow you. Promoted tweets show when users scroll down their timelines or when users search for items related to the promoted tweet.

Example of promoted tweet (by Gap)

Instagram

Instagram has over 3.6 million users in Nigeria; most of the people using twitter are between the ages of 25 and 34. Instagram is avenue to post content (images and videos) from your brand that appeals to the eye in order to create awareness for your brand, drive engagements and generate sales. Engagements include enquiries, and this may help you develop (modify) your product to further meet your customers seeds.

User Generated Contents (UGC) are posts by your customers that mention your brand or displays your product, UGCs carry more weight on instagram as it is a form of influencer marketing for you brand. If customers make post containing elements your brand, they will probably be asked about it by people on their network and you gain more customers by their influence. Instagram is the best platform or gamification i.e. telling your followers to perform certain actions and reward them. Gamification rapidly increases your followers and is a good channel of obtaining quality UGCs.

Example of a Campaign to generate UGCs by KFC. Quality content are used by brand to market product.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn has over 1.8 million users in Nigeria. Most businesses have LinkedIn accounts and professionals connect with one another on LinkedIn, this gives LinkedIn an elite and corporate appearance, making it best for Business to Business (B2B) marketing. LinkedIn is a place to market Business solutions and skill training as most people on LinkedIn are looking for ways to become more efficient in their jobs and add more skills to their profile. LinkedIn can also be a good channel to build the corporate side of your brand and link to potential investors.

Pinterest

Pinterest has less than 500 thousand users in Nigeria; this relatively low amount of users is because most brands feel Pinterest is too similar to Instagram. This view is jaundiced because Pinterest is an awesome platform for best designs; this makes it an abode of ideas. 81% of Pinterest users are females, there are fashion and home designs, artworks and graphic designs, making it a good place to market your business to people in that bracket.

Which of the Platform suits your Business the most?

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