A fundamental rule of marketing is to meet your target audience where they already are. For Nigerian businesses, that place is social media. In 2025, an estimated 38.7 million users Nigerians were on social media, representing 36.2% of the total internet users. Beyond just numbers, data shows Nigerians spend a significant amount of time on these platforms daily. This proves that users in Nigeria don’t just have accounts; they are highly active and engaged.
This deep penetration and reliance on social media make it an essential tool for businesses in Nigeria. In this article, we’ll outline how your business can leverage social media to drive sustainable growth.
Strategies for Leveraging Social Media for Growth
While using social media may seem intuitive, the competition for attention is fierce. Any brand that intends to stand out must have a clear strategy. Here, we highlight proven strategies to help businesses in Nigeria cut through the noise, reach their target audience, and drive desired actions.
1. Implement Paid Advertising
Most social media platforms are increasingly adopting a “pay-to-play” model. Unlike in previous years, when platforms rewarded posts with organic exposure, reaching your target audience organically has become significantly more difficult. Therefore, paid advertising should be a core element of your social media strategy in Nigeria today. Engaging a digital marketing agency in Nigeria with social media expertise ensures effective paid ads implementation.
However, social media ads are only effective when implemented correctly. We recommend that businesses:
- Start small: Begin with a modest budget to test, iterate, and find winning combinations of platforms, messaging, creative, and targeting before scaling up.
- Use geo-targeting: During the test phase, you can target specific Nigerian cities like Lagos, Port Harcourt, and Abuja to find what works best before launching a nationwide campaign.
- Measure everything: It’s crucial to set up measurement and attribution correctly. Establish existing benchmarks that can serve as a performance yardstick for your ads. This will inform you of their overall performance and help you gauge success.
2. Optimize for Mobile Users
The vast majority (86.2%) of all internet visits happen on mobile phones. It is essential to prioritize these users by adapting your content and creatives for a mobile-first experience. For example:
- Use vertical formats: Posts and videos should ideally use a vertical aspect ratio (e.g., 9:16) as opposed to landscape (16:9).
- Prioritize short-form video: Content like Reels, Shorts, and TikTok-style videos should be a priority over traditional long-form content.
- Add captions to videos: Videos should have captions to cater to users watching without audio, which is a common practice.
We also advise conducting a content audit. Identify existing content that isn’t optimized for mobile and update it. This could include snipping long-form videos into multiple short clips and adding captions.
3. Engage With Your Audience
Treating social media like a traditional mass communication channel (like TV or radio), where communication is a one-way street, is a recipe for failure. On social media, your business must actively seek and encourage two-way communication and feedback from your audience through likes, comments, DMs, and shares.
Engaging with your audience builds trust, which in turn encourages the platform’s algorithm to show your profile to more users. Some businesses shy away from encouraging active conversation due to the fear of negative reviews. They may even suppress or outrightly delete such comments.
However, in our experience, users trust businesses that promptly address negative feedback and make an effort to resolve the issue more than businesses with 100% positive feedback, which can look inorganic or incentivized.
Ideas to drive engagement include:
- Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions
- Polls and quizzes
- Limited-time giveaways and promotions
Also Read: Social Media Marketing in Nigeria, in this guide we outline clear, actionable roadmap to mastering social media marketing and getting results for brands in Nigeria.
4. Leverage Influencer Marketing
Influencers already have thriving communities with active, engaged members. Businesses can partner with these influencers to launch effective social media campaigns targeted at their audience. When implementing influencer marketing, it is important to select influencers within your business niche and ensure they are a good fit for your brand’s values.
Additionally, businesses must do their due diligence to ensure an influencer has a genuinely engaged audience and not artificially inflated numbers.
Measuring Success and Scaling
Like any other aspect of marketing, measurement is critical for social media. Data is one of the key advantages digital marketing has over traditional methods. In this section, we’ll highlight the key metrics to track, recommended tools for analytics, and tips for scaling your campaigns.
Key Metrics to Track
- Engagement Rate: Calculated using likes, comments, shares, and saves. A high engagement rate indicates that your content resonates with your audience. Conversely, a low rate suggests your content isn’t relatable or you’re targeting the wrong audience.
- Reach and Impressions: Reach is the number of unique people who see your post, while impressions are the total number of times your post is displayed. An expanding reach signifies growing brand awareness.
- Follower Growth Rate: The percentage increase in followers over time demonstrates how effectively your content attracts new users. A declining follower rate signals issues that should be addressed quickly.
- Website Traffic from Social Media: Although platforms increasingly prefer to keep users within their ecosystem (the “zero-click web”), it’s still worthwhile to track website traffic and eventual conversions originating from social media.
Recommended Tools for Analytics
Using analytics tools makes tracking easier and provides valuable insights. Recommended tools include:
- Platform-Native Tools:
- Instagram Insights: Displays audience demographics, engagement, and reach.
- Facebook Business Suite: Offers page analytics, ad performance tracking, and audience insights.
- YouTube Studio: Provides data on watch time, audience retention, and traffic sources.
- Google Analytics: Tracks website traffic and conversions driven by social media.
- Third-Party Paid Tools: Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social, Brandwatch, etc.
Conclusion
Social media is an extremely effective tool for Nigerian businesses, offering huge potential for brand visibility, consumer interaction, and increased sales. However, success requires a strategic, data-driven approach.
Start small, experiment with different strategies, and analyze what works best for your audience. By adapting and improving your approach based on real-time findings, you can maximize your impact.
Need effective social media marketing, send a message to Kreste Digital – a leading Social Media Marketing Agency in Nigeria
