More Nigerians exploiting Internet platforms tell inspiring stories, FOLASHADE ADEBAYO and GEOFF IYATSE write
These days, Seun Sangoleye, an entrepreneur of three years, cannot afford to part with her phones. In the comfort of her home in Lagos, the Mum-in-Chief, BabyGrubz Outfit, attends to beeps and alerts on her phones with the speed of light.
She is also never far away from her computers on her centre table, from which she runs monthly online courses, sells e-books, broadcasts messages on Blackberry Messenger, while not forgetting to tweet and post messages about her business on Facebook.
The breathtaking drill is radically different from her former employment as a system and network analyst, but Sangoleye also admits that leveraging on the social media has also been a game changer. She adds that her typical day is now spent tending to her devices, waiting for orders across and beyond the country. Since she left her job in 2013 and creating a social media hub around her business, the entrepreneur says patronage has climbed from five to 20 orders per week.
She enthuses, “The social media is the entire lifeline of my business. My entire customer base is on the Internet. People meet me online and I get referrals from there. I consult and run nutritional classes online. I have a business group of 15,000 mothers, people I have never met in my life.
I engage the mothers who have issues about their children who do not eat well or are picky eaters and I prescribe and sell my menus to them.”
Sangoleye is not alone. The social media magic is also working for Adeola Olowe, a stay-at-home mum who works as a copywriter for an advertising agency in Lagos. Olowe does not have a brick and mortar office, but meets deadlines writing and sending short stories and advertising copies to her employer online.
Olowe
While preparing her copies, Olowe says, she is able to generate creative ideas by starting discussions on social media platforms and watching the comments stream in. The writer says the approach has made her work easier as she is able to add colour and depth to the characters in her stories.
Also, a few years ago, Victor Mathias would travel miles away from his remote residence at Iyan Oba, a Lagos suburb, to the metropolis to earn a decent living. If he were to work for himself, he would need to raise some good money for a start-up enterprise he was not sure would survive.
Mathias’ case was a typical example of how harsh it was for many young Nigerians some years back. However, without a physical office, the 28-year-old Sociology graduate, nowadays works and operates from his home. While millions of Lagos residents struggle through daily traffic snarls to get to their offices, Mathias simply turns on his laptop and wireless Internet router to start his daily routine. His work-from-home employment, as many would call it, is paying his bills. Besides, he practically calls the shot from this “small enclave.”
Until recently, young people who stayed indoors, glued to their personal computers connected to the Internet when their neighbours were out in the field, were often treated with suspicion. Many people believed that all of them were into yahoo-yahoo, a Nigerian parlance for cybercrimes, such as advance free fraud and hacking.
Nowadays, the stereotype is changing. The same Internet that ushered in the regrettable era dubbed yahoo-yahoo has created new streams of opportunities for young people to earn decent living and incomes.
Unlike cybercriminals, who operated behind the scene, the new Internet-made idols carry on with dignity, creating an aura of celebrities around themselves. Again, unlike Internet fraudsters, who could be described as products of Internet dysfunction, these people prefer to call themselves social media entrepreneurs.
Internet as a money-spinner
Mathias does not want to put a figure to his monthly earnings. But he says his average monthly income – all from Internet-related contracts – is not less than N90, 000, five times higher than the country’s N18, 000 minimal wages. Olowe, who says she has always got her writing jobs on the Internet, discloses that she earns a decent salary while Sangoleye, who makes sales running into several thousands of naira, says she would not trade social media entrepreneurship for anything else.
Like hundreds of other Nigerian youths who have succeeded in eking out a living from the Internet, Mathias pockets his revenue untaxed. This is because the government has yet to fashion out an implementable tax formula for the new and fast-growing business.
Yet, Mathias says he is just scratching the surface of the goldmine, which digital media has become. According to him, dozens of people he looks up to as professional mentors make as much as N1m or more every month.
With this veiled reference, Mathias may be pointing to the ilk of celebrity bloggers who have successfully embraced the commercial segment of what used to be a social engagement.
However, experts say money-making as a social media entrepreneur is highly specialised and segmented. In fact, Benny Capricorn, operator of bennycapricorn.com, prefers to use specialisation to describe the multifaceted dimension of social media entrepreneurship.
According to him, blogging has now become the entry point for social media entrepreneurs. He avers that the Internet is crawling with individuals who use different networking platforms to drive their businesses.
Beyond this, Capricorn says tweeting has become a goldmine for savvy people who can tweet creative contents that can attract comments. He says this crop of people are sought by companies and organisations who covet the attention of their followership.
Tweeting for a living
Tweeting has created a window of opportunities for Kemi, a daughter of a former Oyo State governor, Omololu-Olunloyo, to earn foreign currencies, through what she calls tweet aggregation.
Kemi Omololu-Olunloyo
From her Ibadan, Oyo State home, Omololu-Olunloyo says she tweets for The Independent, The Telegraph, The Guardian, all newspapers of the UK, for between $60 (N12,000) and $80 (N16,000) per tweet.
“When I was in America doing the same thing, I consider the amount very small. But when I earn and convert it to naira, it is big money. This is what many young Nigerians can do. They promote artistes for free whereas in the United States and Europe, nobody tweets when they are not paid,” she says.
The social media influencer says she also uses her @HNNAfrica to tweet for American singers, who are desirous of marketing their songs in Africa, for at least $50 (N10,000) per post.
Tweet aggregation is not the only social media avenue through which Omololu-Olunloyo, who spent 35 years in the US and Canada before returning home, earns money. In 2011 alone, according to her, she made $25,000 (N5million) from YouTube videos. She says video content is the quickest and most viable way to make money from social media today.
Omololu-Olunloyo has since embedded permanent posts of Pepsi and KFC on her Instagram account, diversifying her streams of income. According to her, both companies paid her $500 (N100,000) each for the sponsored post in 2011. She adds that she has also done social media campaigns for UK-based Prestige, a real estate company.
“They paid me because I asked for that. Nigerian social media users need to be aggressive if they want to make money. They should go after companies and tell them what they can do and what it will cost them,” she notes.
Surprisingly, it is not only the big brands that are on contract lists of social media influencers. Small firms are also taking serious interest in using individuals with online presence to aggregate visibility. For instance, Omololu-Olunloyo says she was paid $60 (N12,000) to post a tweet for a water company in Anambra State recently.
“Everybody can make money from social media. They must monetise their blogs as I have done to HNNafrica.com. They should not only monetise adverts but also posts. They should charge people for tweeting and re-tweeting for them. That is what I have done on Instagram, PInterest, Twitter and YouTube,” she says.
Social media of brand ambassadors
Capricorn adds, “What many companies do when they have social media campaigns to run, is that they engage tweeters to tweet for them. They could say, ‘I want the campaign to trend with conversations around the subject.’ Otherwise, they may be only interested in seeing hashtags on the campaigns on trending list, not minding the conversations that push it.”
Capricorn
On how this category of people are remunerated, he explains, “The pay varies, depending on the company that is involved, the number of hours or days it wants to be on trending list and several other factors. Multinational companies, big brands and political figures pay handsomely for the service.”
He adds that a blogger’s ability to bargain is part of what determines the amount paid for the service, which is majorly on an hourly basis. According to him, the last time he participated in a trending contract (which involved a politician), he was paid N50, 000 for an hour.
Tweeters, who specialise in trending campaign – whether commercial or political, it was learnt – operate in networks. Members of a particular network are alerted to commence post as soon as a contract is issued.
Another way companies get on trending list is by using brand ambassadors. Capricorn says this is not entirely free because service is a part of the engagement intrigues.
There are Twitter handles that require less than 10 per cent of their followers to participate in a campaign to make it go viral. For instance, 1.1 million Twitter users currently follow Michael Collins (popularly known as Don Jazzy). He is among the most engaging Nigerian celebrities on Twitter, a reason he follows back over 70,000 fans. Don Jazzy’s tweets can generate 100,000 engagements in a matter of minutes.
Some 1.7million Twitter users currently follow Ayo Balogun, also known as Wizkid. He only needs five per cent of his primary community to participate in a tweet to generate 85,000 retweets. Experts say half of this figure is enough to make a campaign go viral in Nigeria.
For Tiwa Savage, also an artiste, no fewer than 1.17 million users follow her, and five per cent of that is figure is 58,500. Just two or three tweets on a single hashtag by Savage can generate or surpass this.
Capricorn says corporate organisations that are currently cashing in on brand ambassadors to boost social media performances understand these tricks. Those who are not perching on celebrity status to drive traffic, he adds, use give-away strategies.
Companies, such as Konga and Jumia Nigeria, leading competitors in the country’s burgeoning e-commerce service, seem to have mastered this strategy. When they unveil a new campaign, they create a social media buzz around it by inviting users to tweet, retweet or post it to win a prize.
Omojuwa
Earlier this month, Jumia launched a campaign about its Instagram page. Internet users were to upload videos with a promotional hashtag or tag friends to follow the page to win shopping vouchers. Telecommunications firms occasionally use airtime to generate interactions for their social media campaigns.
Capricorn says many young people have keyed into these offers to make extra income to seek support.
All that glitters…
But Sangoleye says there are carrots as well as sticks in social media entrepreneurship. She says though she has been able to master the turf, being constantly on the phone and computer is tasking.
There are more challenges. “Some people will place their orders online only for us to find out that they gave us fake addresses. You won’t be able to find them. Also, people post nonsensical things, asking why I am charging to teach other mothers how to feed their children. But I try to be discreet when posting my responses because my posts are my voice in that circumstance,” she says.
Olowe has also had to deal with hate messages in the course of working online. According to her, the way out is not to return the fire but to empathise with the person involved.
“I have not had serious challenges but I am always conscious of how my topics are interpreted. I still take negative comments in my stride. It is better to reason and see the point of view of the person involved,” she says.
Experts have however, noticed a trend where individuals have started making brisk business of the obsession for cult following on social media. There are now adverts, saying, “Boost your Twitter following for as low as N10 per follower?” Pause and Google – I want to buy Twitter followers!
On Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, one can buy ‘influence’ with cash-and-carry followers. It is part of the ‘sharp-sharp’ syndrome associated with social media.
Does this work? Omololu-Olunloyo, who joined Facebook when it was being test-run in the United States, says it is a gimmick.
“When you buy followers, in less than six months, they will disappear because they are not real users. These so-called followers cannot interact because they are fictitious accounts opened for commercial reasons. The only way you can get followers is by creating shareable content,” she advises.
Controversial Kemi, as she is often called on social media, says digital media offers a goldmine to Nigerian youths to work their way out of poverty. But unfortunately, she laments, a larger per cent of users waste their data abusing others.
Gradually, experts say the Internet is erasing the old lines that once separated Nigerian consumers, for instance, from the United Kingdom market. As such, the global market, as the global village concept envisaged long time ago, has become vast interlinked virtual community, with companies reaching out to consumers across different countries on computer and mobile devices.
Many people who are currently harnessing the monetary value of digital media in the country signed up their first pages just to make friends. But Omojuwa says he had business in mind when he started.
In an email interview with one of our correspondents, Omojuwa, whose rise to stardom was driven by social media, lists online marketing, public relations, direct sale and apps as new areas Nigerian youths currently make money from.
On the contract process, he says, “They are often engaged for specific campaigns. Most of the time, the organisations engage social media influencers via advertising agencies. They, at times, go directly.”
As the traditional media do, Omojuwa says social media entrepreneurs also consider the relationship between a campaign and their “regular content” before accepting an offer.
The era is also that of apps. In the words the Brand Manager of Google Nigeria, Taiwo Kola-Ogunlade, there is an app for every activity under the sun. But more importantly, the question is whether Nigerians have started making money from apps.
At the Ikeja Computer Village, Lagos, and other telephone markets in the country, app downloading, sharing and upgrading is a huge industry. A 24-year-old Tunde Sanyaolu, says he makes, at least, N6,000 daily from app consumers daily. He pays rent for the few square-meters he shares with his friend in Ikeja; yet he goes back home every day with modest income.
“They patronise us because ours are cheaper than when they download using their data. Some people don’t even know where to visit to download relevant apps,” he says.
On what local app developers earn, Chidiebere Nnadi, a digital marketing professional, notes, “I know of many Nigerians who live on creating apps for the first employers or clients. I also know of only a handful of Nigerians who live on creating apps as individuals, but their earnings are largely dependent on many factors, including the cost of the app, the number of purchases they get and the usefulness of the app.”
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