Nigeria Joins World Social Media Day Celebrations

O’Lekan Babatunde

History was made on the 30th of June, 2010 as the first Social Media Marketing Flash Mob held at the lounge of popular bar, The Place, G.R.A Ikeja, Lagos, to celebrate the 1st World Social Media Day. The event also put in place structures for what will become the Association of Social Media Marketers in Nigeria .
Convened by Dayo Adefila, head, digital marketing at Insight Communications and well supported by Yinka Olaito, a globally recognized social media personality, the gathering attracted like minded professionals cutting across agencies, clients side as well as independent marketers.
Although, this growing field of marketing is said to be largely undefined in the Nigerian market currently, it is noteworthy that corporate organizations and forward looking businesses and individuals, in line with global trends, are steadily developing competencies in the area to put their brands on the global radar.
“While individuals may engage in social media for the fun of it, social media lends itself to marketing easily through the smart use of relevant social network platforms and the huge power engaged followers can contribute to brand growth, making it something that is now becoming key to supporting the overall marketing process,” says Adefila.
“That is why we have gathered from different functions and responsibilities spanning creative and account management folk from agencies, brand managers from conglomerates, OOH specialists, the online community, online advertising and applications specialists among others, to form the basis of turning this vocation into an industry of great potential.”
Inevitably, the talk turned to consider which brands in Nigeria are using social media and their success level. GTBank, MTV Base and Samsung rated high in their disposition to using social media to enhance marketing and building their respective brands. In the final analysis, the panel submitted that while MTV Base and Samsung are more interactive and take comments from their on-line community, GTBank’s social media platforms for now focus more on making information available to consumers. While this is laudable, Adefila and Olaito maintain that 2-way interaction between brand and consumer is a better approach.
They stress that for social media to drive a business or brand, it is necessary for promoters to adopt the Know Your Consumers (KYC) model as there is no silver bullet. Promoters also need to carry out research, study impact and make adjustments as they go along. Another paramount point to note is that social media is about helping people. “Provide them with relevant information in an interactive manner and this will ensure traffic to the site”, they say. Don’t just push information at them 24/7.
Examples are said to abound, zappos.com uses social media to build connections that yield multimillion dollar profits today. Similarly, Gary Vaynerchucks through the power of social media built his father’s company from $4million to $50million within a record time of less than three years. For Olaito, specialists that will excel must study behavioural science and have human relations skills as an over concentration on technology and corporate monologue will not work; “We can drive traffic with engagement, love, etc; and of course, quality service which is part of the service or brand experience is equally important.”
As far as social media campaigns are concerned, Adefila notes that it is clear there is a growing need to understand the consumer and what he does as a digital citizen; a need to become relevant to him in this arena and engage the consumer in a mutually respective and inspiring dialogue. This is why there is nothing realistic about asking for a 3-month social media campaign!
She ends on a futuristic note predicting that in the next one year, more brands will have sought help on how to engage the over 23.9m Nigerians who have online access within the country and use this as a platform to build even more meaningful brands and even more rewarding bottom line results.