For Nigerian SMEs, Facebook may be your best bet for social media advertising right now.

For small businesses, advertising has always
been a heavy burden. A quick look at the ad
budget of some large scale enterprises and you’ll
understand that the barrier to entry for
traditional media advertising is way too high.
SMEs can not compete on the same turf with
these guys. Which is why social media was such
a huge game changer and caused a significant
shift in the advertising landscape.
Suddenly, SMEs could reach more people,
acquire more customers and outperform even
the big businesses in the marketplace. All you
needed was the right skill and knowledge (and
possibly early adopter’s advantage).
Right now, for small businesses looking to grow
their user/customer base, Facebook advertising
looks like the platform giving the best value for
money. Here’s why:
16 million Nigerians (and counting)
According to Facebook’s latest report, Nigeria
has 16 million people logging into the platform,
at least once a month(the highest of all African
countries). About 7 million of them log in
everyday, making Nigeria Facebook’s biggest
market.
(No) Character Limit
Twitter has its appeal, obviously but the
character limit presents a handicap that is not so
conducive for ads. Even Twitter agrees, which is
why they may be increasing the character limit
anytime soon. Facebook has a 63,000 character
limit (that’s about a tenth of a novel). More than
enough for you to persuade your audience to try
out your product or service.
Facebook collects and uses personal data to
target ads
As a user, this irks me. But as an advertiser, this
is a dream come true. Google’s been doing this
for years, so why not Facebook? Targeted ads
means you can be sure people with the right
interests got to see your ads. For years, Facebook
has tweaked their code to accumulate more user
data. And now, a lot of that data is available to
advertisers.
Barrier to entry
This is a bit of a personal observation but it
seems like, everyone (plus their uncle) is on
Facebook. Twitter seems to be crawling all over
with millennials, Instagram still hasn’t caught on
as much and a lot of folks are still trying to
figure out what SnapChat is. Facebook is still the
only social network with broad appeal, for now.
Support from HQ
Top Facebook executives recently met with
advertising agencies and SME owners in Nigeria
to discuss ways to use the Facebook platform to
grow their business. A few entrepreneurs shared
success stories , about how they’ve used
Facebook advertising to drive their business.
For example, Dejuwon Isola-Osobu, founder and
CEO of Jayosbie, an online fashion store for men,
highlighted how cheap Facebook advertising is,
especially when compared with other social
media platforms. He explained that a recent
campaign by his brand delivered 14,000 clicks
for just $260.
Nunu Ntshingila, Head of Africa for Facebook,
also went on record to say, Facebook is “the best
platform for African SMEs to promote their
brands.”
I’d have to agree with her.