Social Media Marketing: Twitter "follow suggestion" best thing yet!

I believe the only reason Twitter has not surpassed Facebook is due to its poor early user retention. (strictly my own personal opinion).

Well, another personal opinion too, in the long term, Twitter is by far more engaging than Facebook! So if Twitter will find a way to keep new users and keep them engaged so they come back more and more once they've signed up, then Twitter will be on its way to becoming bigger than Facebook.

The new suggestions for people to follow, which now twitter shows you has put the short messaging service on that road to becoming the next biggest web service, and guess what... If and when Twitter reaches the #1 status, its going to stay up there for long just for its nature and how engaging it can be to users in the long term.

So what's in it to gain for marketers and businesses as long as this new development is concerned?

Twitter is going to help Marketers engage consumers much more than Facebook. I believe the only reason users would leave Twitter is if they are not following the people they should follow. I mean the right people who reflect the users interest. Consumers will be engaged by twitters feature that allows users to quote, re-tweet and @replies. Brands that know what they are doing are already making great use of twitter.

By the new suggestion feature, if the site will be smart enough to suggest to users the right people to follow, then Twitter is going to grow more rapidly in the coming months. And as more of our friends from Facebook and in real life get on Twitter, we will begin to use the service more and stay longer.

Conclusively, Twitter is the future.. No seriously it is!

Google Discontinues Nexus One, Android May Now Lack Hardware Rythm!

This is not a blog about gadgets, phones and the likes. But it is a startup blog and today I am focusing my post on user experience around hand-held gadgets! Specifically Smartphones.

User experience or user interface design is a must learn for any startup in a consumer market.

I am talking about android, nexus one and the user experience around the combination here. Many users reported the nexus one (users that have other smartphones, like Iphone or Blackberry) as the best smartphone they've ever used, and Google stopped the nexus phone. Is android going to end up an orphan in the mobile OS market? Not at all. Android has got Motorolla, HTC and even a tablet called Inye soon to be unveiled in Abuja Nigeria.

Google's main problem is being massively out-sold by Apple's Iphone. The Iphone 4 sales where heading for the million mark while Google had only sold a little above a hundred thousand phones. But is the Nexus one really a better phone than the Iphone? Well. a lot of users that have used both phones say so!

The Nexus one gave android the hardware match it needed. If you doubt this, here is an example for the Blackberry user who use their phone to tweet. Before the Blackberry had its own Twitter app, there was UberTwitter. And when RIM launched its official twitter app, those that switched to the app, would certainly witness a change in performance and experience when the use their blackberry phones to tweet.

For some reasons, I wont say on this blog if the change the Blackberry users witnessed is positive or negative. Nonetheless, it's a good example of software/app and hardware rythm or fit! Same goes with OS and the hand-held device.

The Nexus one is the phone that users had the best experience running android on. Now that its gone, where does the android stand against othe mobile OS!

The facts show surprisingly, android is even gaining ground by beating all the rest smartphone operating systems. Including RIM and Iphone OS who make their own hardware for their OS exclusively!

Android is number one selling mobile OS in the US for the second quater of this year reports the NPD Group. I still believe, Android would have done better with the Nexus, which I believe brings out the best of the OS. I guess its still all good for Google's mobile OS.

Startup Advice: Get Ready To Go Big Or Go Home Early!

Right from the beginning of the commercial web, you have to be super ambitious as a startup in other to stay longer than the next code innovation!

You have to be ambitious and focused on a market for a start. But you have to keep your eye on the big picture by following market shifts and new products or new startups launching. You have to think how you are going to gain more n more market share over time.

Your team also needs to be obsessed with innovation if you don't wanna be the next Myspace. You have to try new things, new ways and new code to improve your products performance. If elese, someone will get inspired by your idea and move to your market and beat you.

Come to think of it, Google came up with the "don't be evil" slogan and from the search engine that they started with, now they have a blogging platform which I am now writing this article on, an architectural design software (Google sketch), an operating system, a smartphone OS, a mobile phone brand, Google Earth, a mobile ad platform, the list goes on and on.

The point I am trying to make here is that, to be a big success, you have to think of dominating the World atleast a few times before you go to sleep! :). No... Seriously.. You have to dream of ruling the market you are in and you have to try to see that it comes true! Just trying to be a player in the market isn't healthy for an aspiring startup to dream.

Now Lets take a look at Facebook. You think Mark Zuckerberg only wanted to build a social network for college students? Well may be you buy that, but I don't. I don't know how true the stories in the book "accidental Billionaires by Ben Mizrich" is, but Mark is really an ambitious person. You can check out the book here http://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Billionaires-Founding-Facebook-Betrayal/dp/0385529376

You really need to hope to be big when you are just starting and work towards that. If not, you may not even get to start. Did I confuse you? Well, I'm sure the ones that really have the startup DNA in them know what I'm talking about!

Nigerian Version of Twitter is a Total Waste of Time! Why is Everyone Doing it?

The truth is, we cannot really handle or consume properly the amount of information that is sent flowing our way all the time. With new services, it's only getting worse and we are becoming less productive by the day.

We are trying to stay updated with the latest news, Global and local, at the same time we are trying to keep up with latest trends, stay up-to-date with friends and family on facebook, follow what our friends and role models are tweeting, talk to contacts on blackberry messenger, we have blog posts to read and more........

So with all this information we are following, do we have room in our heads or time for another twitter like app specifically for Nigeria?

For a sec, let us take a look at what happened to FriendFeed. I am not saying they failed, so don't get me wrong. The guys didn't fail, the got a nice exit and sold to Facebook. But recently, FriendFeed has become nothing more than a platform for tweets, a secondary tweet platform. The activity is on Twitter so don't go against the tide by trying to build your own twitter (thats like re-inventing the wheel when they already have airplanes). Instead, find a way to tap twitters content!

This is just a short reminder for my fellow Naija Internet entrepreneurs.

Correction from last article. Nairaland was started in 2005!

Thanks to Seun Osewa for making the facts clearer from our last blog post! Nairaland was started in 2005 and not 2001 as we earlier wrote (seems like its been around for a decade).

That means Nairaland grew even at a faster rate that we thought. Getting to 500,000 members in just 5 years in the Nigerian webspace is truly remarkable!

Startup Lessons: 3 Ways Nairaland Got So Big!

Nairaland has been around for a long time.. So have so many other early Nigerian websites, but Nairaland has outlived them to become successful.

Here are 3 (THREE) reasons I think Nairaland lived and grew successful over the years.

1. FIRST MOVER ADVANTAGE

Nairaland started around 2001... A year or even 2 before I got my first web presence. Nairaland is one of the earliest web properties in Nigeria.

There are early Nigerian sites that haven't changed a bit since they first started and they have successfully made themselves forgotten.. look at Motherland Nigeria. I am not saying MotherlandNigeria.com is a failure. As a matter of fact, it was a pioneering and great site back in the day. But I don't think it has changed in it's 11 years of existence. I'm just saying....

I'm saying, Nairaland utilized it's early advantage and grew very large over time (since 2001). This huge over time growth means lots of posts on the forum, many threads, many topics, many users (readers and posters) and many pages of the forum indexed in many search engines overtime for a wide variety of search keywords/keyphrases and ranked high in search results due to long articles (threads), freshness of content and external links.

As a result of above, Nairaland gets a lot of traffic from search engines alone and new user are brought to the site, many end up registering to participate in the discussion..

It all goes back to the first mover advantage... now Half a million registered users.

2. VIRAL & WORD OR MOUTH.

People talk about Nairaland a lot, in real life, they talk about stories they have read on Nairaland and discussions or polls they have participated in to their friends and so on, thereby spreading news of Nairaland through word of mouth...

Viral, this happens when people forward or share links to Nairaland threads/pages on other sites, through email, on facebook or as tweets.. This causes a wave of commenting, sharing, resharing and retweeting. The story on Nairaland and the user participation make it go viraland grow bigger with fresh users discovering the site all the time.

3. USER ENGAGEMENT

The gists, the gossip and discussions make Nairaland engaging. A poll I once came across on Nairaland comparing the site and Facebook in user engagement, Nairaland beat Facebook hands down in Nairalanders perspective.


So there you have it... The 3 (THREE) secrets that made Nairaland once the most trafficked Nigerian website. You can still use the same secrets right now and build a 500000 user or even million user online empire in Nigeria.

Study these 3 points well and build them into your web service or application...

Venture Capital Funds for Nigerian Startups

I have written earlier on this blog about Venture Capital funding in Nigeria here - 4 reason why Nigerian startups aren't funded. As the title indicates, it wasn't a nice article to write because it spots failures of Nigerian Entrepreneurs, Investors and the country's infrastructure in general.

The truth is, there are some Venture Capital firms in Nigeria, though they hardly focus on Internet or technology startups. They are mostly into telecom, oil industry and services. I still think they are worth giving a short if you are confident with what you are building and the market size is HUGE! Yeah, you need a huge market for the kind of returns these VCs are looking for.

So if you are focusing your startup on Nigeria alone, then I am not sure if you should approach these Venture Capitalist because they make investments of around $10 million which is too large for a small market focus.

Anyway... Here is a list of some some Venture Capital firms focussed on Nigeria.

1. Travant Capital

2. Adlevo Capital

3. Menlo Ventures

4. Providence Equity Partners LLC

5. African Capital Allowance

So goodluck on pitching.

Most Importantly Find Angel Investors first. Rich people you know and try to explain your idea or project and see if you can make them understand.

Nigerian Brand Websites Need to be on the Cutting Edge!

This is a real quick post. I'm even typing it while sitting in a car on the road out from Abuja. I was just going through "the web designer mag" a UK web design publication. You can check out the mag at http://www.webdesignermag.co.uk. And I realised how much Nigerian brands only care about having a web presence and they don't bother on being on the cutting edge of the web.

So the first question I think we should answer here is; "do Nigerian websites (brand and product sites) really need to be on the cutting edge?", "Is it worth it for them?" I would give a big YES as answer to both questions. Here are my reasons.

11 million Nigerians online, so as a brand in Nigeria, the web is a marketing and even soon payment channel you dare not neglect.

"So would an ordinary web presence do?" Nope sorry it won't do my firend!

As a company, brand or product, apart from web presence (making people able to find you online even if its only a single HTML page), there are so many messages you can use your website to convey to the consumer. One of them is having the consumer understand you or your product more. You can use web videos for this. Another thing is Interactivity, or being able to listen to your users and give them feedback and being able to improve your product and brand based on info you gather from consumer input.

The newest Mountain Dew drink was all made by users on the web. Mountain Dew makers opened up and listened to consumers on what they would love the drink to taste like. I believe soon, majority (if not all) products would be designed and built with direct consumer involvement in the direction and decision on how the product will be.

So as a brand, you have to have an interactive site that lets your consumers say what they feel about your product and also have them collaborate on some disscussions that you would fall back to when making product decisions. The easiest way to do this is by integrating already social platforms like Facebook connect or Twitter's @anywhere or Twitter connect.

In other news.....
Coincidentally, I just made a quick stop at Mr Biggs, UAC foods (I am not sure what their name is these days). We are at kaduna bypass, It's around 1:30 pm and I haven't eaten any breakfast. I walked into the Mr Biggs and I just couldn't stop my mouth from watering. The Eureka moment came when I thought, how could Mr Biggs use the web to give a customer (a website visitor) a similar experience to what I am having right now? Of course it's not easy for them to make every website visitor's mouth water like mine, but they can still use the web to make you want their product by designing their websiteon the cutting edge with the latest of web technology that would be able to allow for such experience. I am sure a great flash script with some sense of design would get the job done.

I haven't visited Mr Biggs' website before, neither have I searched for it, but I will try and check them out as soon as I have a connection (that is if they do have a website).

So, I'm just saying!

Nigerian Brands can use cutting edge technology in web design to get more people (11 million users online) interested in their products, give their product fans a great experience and a place to hang out online and ultimately make their product better by involving passionate customers/users of their product.

That's not all Nigerian Brands can use the web for. I promised this post to be short, but I promise I will find time to do a detailed post about ways Nigerian brands can use the web.

P.S just used my Effd Up Internet connection to check mrbiggsonlin.com. The site is pretty cool I must say, but can still do better. But UAC foods main site is not as impressive to me.

P.P.S. Thanks http://nigerianbrands.blogspot.com for the image. Had to rip it off your site folks because its the best fit I can find for the post. Thanks guys.

Nairaland Reaches A Milestone: Half A Million Users

Nairaland has been Nigeria's most visited website for a long time (though it has been losing ground recently to job search sites and news sites like jobberman.com and 234next.com plus some newspaper sites).

Recently, Nairaland hit more than 500,000 registered users. This is a huge milestone considering Nairaland allows people to view it's content without registering. If the content was restricted to registered users only, then I believe they userbase will grow bigger and almost double.

This is good news for Nigerian startups, it shows the userbase is there, you only need to smartly find a way to capture it. You can learn from Nairaland's strategies which we would be looking at on this blog. Make sure you subscribe to get the next post on how you can get 500,000 users for your Nigerian site.

You Need User Recommendation to go Viral. So Go Find Those Passionate Users.

The title is really long. But I will try to keep the post as short as I can.

My previous post is supposed to be part of a series I am working on about "Nigerian startups and how they fit in Globally". I will continue with the series shortly, however, I need to squeeze in this post in-between due to some recent happenings in my startup's social media marketing.

Back to today's post.

Today's post is focussed on the power of Passionate users (people that love your product or idea) and how it can push to the roof your marketing, the efficiency of your product development and your market understanding.

How do you find or make passionate users? The truth is, you don't even need to have a product to find people passionate about what you are working on, some people can fall in love with your product the moment they hear about the idea. And they will talk about and recommend you and your product to everyone they know.

To increase your chances of having such passionate prospective users, you need to be active on the social networks. Facebook, Twitter and may be LinkedIn. You need to engage and discuss with your target audience. Some of them will hit you with a conversation, while the rest you will have to talk to first before they respond.

So what makes users passionate and how can their passion help you and your business?
They are mainly your perfect customer. The perfect fit for your product. The people that reallyyy need your product. The people you thought about when you came across your product idea. They may be just like you with the same interest and same perspective on the market.

Above describes exactly what makes up a prospective passionate user of your product. But you need to bring out the passion in the users by connecting with them, discussing with them and getting to know them on a personal level(very important).

They can promote your business across social networks and the rest of the web, they can get you content from friends, may be, and they make good team members because they share your belief and enthusiasm.

Your passionate users will do a lot for you and every business needs them.

HOW TO GO VIRAL!!!!

Going viral is the ultimate peak of every marketing and the number one rule is, NO BUSINESS, IDEA OR VIDEO CAN GO VIRAL WITHOUT PASSIONATE USERS.

I don't believe there is another way around going viral than utilizing your passionate users.

To create a viral campaign, you have to have people (passionate people) that will share whatever you want to go viral with all their trustees and friends on the various popular platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and more. This will ignite the initial spread of the viral campaign.

(The post is becoming long, I need to round up).

Ok. Now, before you reach any conclusions, building a viral campaign can not be complete with only passionate users. You need more than that, You need to build a strategy. But you can't do it without passionate user.

Finally, the only thing that guarantees you of getting many passionate users is a much needed product (product with high demand and if you are a first mover), or any great idea.

Spend most of your time on making sure your product rocks before you invest your time in any viral campaign.

Pioneering startups, Google, Facebook and the noise.

Internet users have been suffering from Information overload, it got only worse in 2009. 2009 saw many startups being crunched up all the time, and almost all claim real-time. Is real-time ahead of it's real time? May be it is.

There are just so many useful web services around that a user wouldn't even know which ones to focus on, so many real-time streams of data (many are pointless or simply spam). The startup scene and online services market is just so saturated and confusing. It is now more important than ever to FOCUS on a niche.

Why you should focus on a niche;

- Specialized content is hard to find because of too much noise. Filtered specialized information is Gold.

- Leave the wide markets for the big guys. Small startups with ambitious projects will be sidelined by the Big Guys as soon as everyone finds out how great the startup's idea is. This will happen unless the startup is really lucky and the team knows how to use the press very well.

- It's so hard to get attention nowadays unless you are in a niche where you can pitch niche bloggers and press. if not, you have to have a GREAT GREAT product.

That said, I think Facebook and Google will have a real face off in 2010.
They are both into real-time, facebook has improved it's search and Google now has profiles(or accounts atleast). With these two and each of them trying to dominate, there is going to be little room for any new startup to go mainstream in 2010 (though, no one can tell how much technology is going to change within the year).

I have a feeling this is very similar to what happened in the late 90s (only now in real-time). ;)

The market will stabilize with time and not without throwing a lot of things (services) that are considered now "hot" out the window. Who knows what? may be real-time search, may be not.