Influencer Marketing In Nigeria started to evolve on Twitter way back then in 2010. Then It was just mostly Organic growth.
A lot of Influencers then chanced upon it, by accident if you so please, they had grown so famous on the Twitter platform to the point where they could leverage on their influence on the platform. It wasn’t their choosing at the time, brands kept approaching them to post out their content which varied from products and/or services to CSR initiatives and so that was the Influencer Marketing niche started growing in Nigeria.
Fast forward to 2018, its just pure Chaos, there are now hundreds of Influencer accounts with mostly ghost followers and empty numbers, so much so that it is almost impossible to tell who has real or fake followers. A lot of recycled content churned in between which questions the authenticity and originality. The resultant effect is the heightened level of deception because everyone wants to make money by becoming an influencer.
A case can be made for the country’s economy being crap and all of that but to arrogantly Twitter violate rules by aggressively buying and selling accounts, RT and likes,makes the industry even more difficult for the ones that still play by the rules and will surely have consequences (but more on this later)
It’s disheartening that all it takes to be an Influencer in the Nigerian space is to have a high number of followers, a lot of the so called ‘influencers’ can barely defend themselves when called up to present marketing tactics in the niche.This aint a tirade somewhat, as a matter of fact it’s a clarion call to clean up the mess that already in place. Twitter is already doing plenty of house keeping in that regards suspending accounts that are either deemed to be fake or that have violated their rules repeatedly.
We all want to earn money but success is not achieved overnight and if ever it did without so much sweat,it cant be sustained, its not too late to make amends, we can bring pride and professionalism to Influencer marketing in Nigerian market.
If you want to become an influencer, understand that it’s a process, it could take you years to grow to make an impactful presence. Stop thinking about how much you should or shouldn’t be making monthly from different campaigns or how many followers you should be getting monthly.Instead, focus on what matters and that’s creating value for your community and this you can do through curating powerful and superb content. Good content will always set you apart and enable you create a real impression in the community.
It also helps to network with the other influencers, they can help viralize your content from time to time and also give you tips on how they started on their journey but overall the job and task is yours. I never said its gonna be easy but hey whoever said that anything good ever came easy.
So yeah, let’s stop the buying and selling of accounts, recycling of followers,Buying likes and RT, these practices make people lose credibility in the industry, let’s task ourselves with new and innovative ways to continue being relevant on the forwardly dynamic medium that’s social media else we’d just be obsolete in time.
That’s just my 2 cents !