Best Social Media Platforms In Nigeria For Marketers and Entrepreneurs

Introduction

Social media has become an integral part of our lives as Nigerians. With the various social media platforms in Nigeria, it’s basically a norm to have almost every Nigerian and their dog on their phone at every given time.

While social media serves a handful of purposes, one that can’t go unrecognized is its marketing potential of Social media. Social media marketing has gone so viral even in Nigeria, is one of the most convenient ways to get the word out about your business and its product or services.

Growing an engaged fan base on the several social media platforms in Nigeria is not a child’s play as each of these platforms comes with its own fair share of difficulty which is quite justified by the results you stand the chance to enjoy if you succeed.

So what are some of the best used social media platforms in Nigeria for marketers?

The social platforms I’ll be listing today will be platforms suitable for marketing by entrepreneurs and small business owners.

1. YouTube

This might come across as a shocker for two reasons:

• YouTube feels more like a platform of its own as it presents features quite different from other social media like Instagram and TikTok.

I won’t disagree with those who feel YouTube should be classified as a social media platform as this marketing medium is more of a search engine than a social media platform. In fact, YouTube happens to be the second largest search engine after Google, owned by Google.

On the other hand, YouTube fits into the social media category as it provides a community tab that is quite similar to the whole structure of Instagram, allowing creators to communicate with their subscribers.

• YouTube might not feel like a true marketing platform 

It almost feels like YouTube is too free to be true, with so much information available to us on this platform. Well, true marketers engage in different activities in the background with YouTube at the top of their marketing funnel helping to build brand awareness.

Owning a YouTube channel is one of the best things you could do for your business, YouTube gets millions of daily search queries and your ability to show up on its search results and convert that traffic to a more accessible one like on an email list or a Facebook group will allow you sell the products and services your business offers more conveniently.

Ready to start a YouTube channel of your own, Read this step-by-step guide on how to get started.

YouTube always provides a paid ad platform where you simply pay YouTube to have your ads show up as the YouTube ads we often see at the start of some videos.

2. Whatsapp

This is an obvious marketing platform especially for Nigerian Marketers but with a caveat. Unlike the other available social media platforms in Nigeria, WhatsApp lacks a huge feature that makes for the power marketing platform: an inbuilt audience.

Instagram and TikTok have an active audience of billions of monthly users, hence allowing marketers to reach out to a wide audience they might have never had to reach.

With WhatsApp, you need to do the work to get contacts of people who might be interested in your services, after which you’ll update your status with photos or updates about your products and services.

The conversion rate from views to sales can be quite rewarding if you have the right people as WhatsApp contacts who perhaps know you on a more personal level and feel a lot safer taking your recommendations. Just like with several other marketing strategies, at the core of your WhatsApp marketing success is a really powerful content strategy.

You’d need to have a balanced mix of educational, entertaining, inspirational, and promotional content ideas to avoid killing your audience engagement by always selling your products and services 

Unfortunately, the WhatsApp marketing channel might not be suitable for all types of businesses, therefore if you’re looking to get started with WhatsApp marketing, you need to make sure your business meets the following criteria.

• General audience:

You need to avoid Niche specific products and services unless you have a means of getting WhatsApp contacts of people in a certain target market. This means you can succeed with marketing products that appeal to a really specific market if you have a consistent strategy for getting these types of contacts.

Your WhatsApp contact strategy might be: joining a niche-specific Facebook group, providing value, and then sharing a WhatsApp link to have them interact with you on a more personal level.

• A huge product or service catalog

Boutiques and clothing lines thrive on WhatsApp marketing for a reason, it’s not a single transaction thing.

Buyers are willing to buy more clothes without feeling sold as they just can’t get enough.

If you run a business that has just one product or service that doesn’t require a retainer or subscription, it might not be a good use of your time marketing on WhatsApp.

I’d rather you spent the same time and effort building an audience on social media platforms with an inbuilt audience which will remove the stress of you having to scout for contacts in order to grow your business.

Snapchat is a marketing platform with a similar strategy to WhatsApp.

3. Facebook

Truth be told, the organic reach on Facebook is dead and I say this in all confidence. While you can get away with posting personal and inspirational content on your profile while still getting high content reach, it’ll shock you to know that Facebook’s algorithm intentionally limits the organic reach of posts with a marketing intent.

This is because Facebook has a robust ads platform and makes its income from it. They need marketers to depend on their ads rather than trying to sell to the audience they’ve built. Frankly speaking, the Facebook ads platform is a blue ocean especially for marketers in Nigeria especially if you’re able to nail your ideal customer avatar and set your targeting options right.

Your Ad copy is also an important element of successful Facebook ads, so don’t sleep on it.

4. Twitter

Selling on Twitter can be of mixed opinions. Everyone knows the platform to be more for the hot lists and updates while feeling like the only way to go viral on Twitter is by going brutal, I still regard Twitter as a viable marketing platform.

If you play your cards well, these platforms might just help your business grow in crazy ways.

Twitter unlike TikTok and Instagram allow for generous leverage of its link feature in the sense that you have the luxury of having clickable links on your profile, tweets, and even comments making it so easy to direct people to your product’s services.

Twitter Marketing only works if done right, especially in Nigeria, this marketing channel is a lot suitable for businesses catering to a general audience such as the health, finance, and self-improvement niche and this is for a just reason. We all know, that Nigerians go to Twitter for one thing “vawulence”.

Hence, it can be really hard to build an audience of people who are interested in a really specific topic. Whereas, marketing a business on a general topic allows most of your audience base to find you interesting and consider buying from you.

5. TikTok

Also known as the “black app”, had widely become a core part of the life of an average Nigerian youth, who finds solace in either making these videos or watching them. If you’re that entrepreneurial youth, it might surprise you to know that TikTok is perfect as a marketing channel.

With how easy it is to go viral on the platform, TikTok has become too magnetic to avid marketers. TikTok’s huge organic reach and active user base come with a caveat.

• The demographic

A majority of the Nigerian TikTok user base is dominated by teens and Youth looking to binge videos all day long. This demographic unfortunately has a really low buying power, hence making it really hard to sell higher-priced products or even any of your products, to be frank, because more TikTok users basically come onto the platform for free content and nothing else.

• The structure and theme of the platform

TikTok is designed to basically keep people scrolling on and on, it can therefore be really hard to get people over to your profile where your links are for sales to make.

How To Market on TikTok in Nigeria

• Always leave a call-to-action asking people to head over to your profile.
• Have an attractive bio that hooks them in
• Send your TikTok audience to a more accessible marketing medium like Instagram or a social media platform with a higher monetization potential like YouTube.
• Sell products that appeal more to the younger audience like wigs, clothes, e.t.c

6. Instagram

This list would be incomplete without Instagram on it. Being one of the more appealing social media platforms for the older demographic with a much higher purchasing power, Instagram is so much more attractive for marketing.

With Instagram, there are so many ways to start marketing, some of which include:

• Instagram stories
• Instagram reels
• Link in bio
• Highlights

You just need to build an appealing profile, share consistent and helpful content on your feed and stories, build an engaged following, start showing up on the explore page, then promote your products and services at least once a week.

P.s Only posting photos of your products and services barely ever work.

Read this article to learn how to market like a pro on Instagram in Nigeria

7. LinkedIn

I’d clarify straight away that LinkedIn isn’t that social media platform you’d want to be on if you cater to the B2C market.

In simpler terms, if your business focuses on selling products to consumers, LinkedIn might not be for you. LinkedIn is a professional networking platform with a larger portion of its users being corporate workers, CEOs, and business owners.

To be successful on LinkedIn, you’d need to have a product or service that appeals to other business owners. E.g Real estate, Marketing services, wholesaling companies e.t.c LinkedIn from the outside might seem like that boring version of Facebook, but I kid you not, it’s definitely not a marketing platform to sleep on and this is why

• LinkedIn users are more successful professionals with a really high purchasing power.
• LinkedIn has a very high organic reach potential.

Conclusion

Having listed out the top 7 social media platforms in Nigeria for marketing, it’s best to end with quick advice. Social media marketing is a blessing to business owners but it comes with one major downside, the need for consistent efforts.

To keep getting sales and customers on social media, you’d need to keep posting on these platforms and this isn’t a really convenient condition, especially for busy entrepreneurs. You need a way to Market your business quite hands off, doing the work once and reaping the fruits in years to come.

This is why search engines are gold. Creating blog posts and sites that rank on google can help you get sales and leads for your business almost passively. Once you start getting traffic from these search engines, you might want to consider email marketing to capture them into a more confined zone that gives you a higher convenience.

This makes it so easy for me to tag SEO and Email Marketing my power marketing duo. If you’re ready to start driving traffic to your website using SEO and Email Marketing, learn more about our services here.