With the largest population and largest economy in Africa, more than 140 million users of GSM phones and over 67 million Nigerians on the internet, Nigeria should have thousands of bloggers. But I doubt if there are up to 1000 active bloggers in Nigeria.
I visit more than 50 blogs everyday from all the social network sites, so in over 11 years of being active online and started blogging in 2005, I have been following Nigerian bloggers and once belonged to the elites of Global Voices and became the first Nigerian blogger to screen entries for the highly esteemed Online News Association's annual Online Journalism Awards that no Nigerian blog or news website has made the long list.
There are more than 23 million Nigerians on social network sites; Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others and they have contributed millions of posts in words, photos and videos to make these sites what they have become today. But majority of them have not made money on these social network sites, except the bloggers among them.
The fact is anybody who can use Facebook can also blog, but they don't know that they can do so.
You see Nigerians on Facebook still asking me how they can blog!
Nigerians on Facebook break news before CNN, Reuters, BBC, Channels and others, but Facebook does not pay them a single cent! And they would have made money if they were doing so on blogs with adverts and affiliate marketing promos.
The numbers of Nigerian men blogging are 100 times more than the Nigerian women blogging.
Why are Nigerian women too lazy to blog?
The popularity of Bella Naija. Laila Ikeji, Linda Ikeji and other top female bloggers in Nigeria should have attracted thousands of Nigerian women to blog, but they have not joined them.
We can count Nigerian female bloggers on our finger tips! And as mommy bloggers are popular in North America and western Europe, I expected Nigerian mommy bloggers to emerge, but that is yet to happen. And there is a big social media market for them in the largest market in Africa. But they are ignorant of this fact. They would have been making more millions of naira than Bella, Linda and Laila.
The best Nigerian female blogger is Bella Naija in professional content and context of blogging.
Being the most popular blogger does not make you the best.
Oshodi market is more popular than Shoprite, but you cannot compare it to the class and sophistication of Shoprite.
The social media market in Nigeria will be worth billions of naira, but it is not yet booming, because Nigerian advertisers and marketers are still lagging behind in 21st media. Only few of them are world class.
Many of them don't even know that they can boost the Nigerian economy 100 times by how much they use social media to attract more millions of consumers to the various products and services of their clients.
Recently, we were debating on Seeking Alpha why some music streaming sites such as Spotify and iHeartRadio are not making money compared to online movies websites like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Instant Video and people mentioned how Amazon and Netflix have been able to rise above others. But Amazon has an edge over Netflix, because of the advantages of using social media. And blogs rule the social media and that makes bloggers the rulers of social media.
Many Nigerians go gaga over the fame and fortune of Linda Ikeji, but they fail to ask why is she the only female blogger making millions of naira? It can only happen in Nigeria and cannot happen in America or Europe, because it is contrary to standards of social media.
Only few advertisers and marketers in Nigeria know this fact.
Majority of Nigerian advertisers and marketers don't even know the trends in social media public relations and marketing and many Nigerian bloggers are also clueless about these trends.
In fact, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo were caught napping by amazing success of Pinterest and buyable Pins! And I know majority of Nigerians online are clueless about buyable Pins!
The fact is, blogs have some great things that will give Pinterest big competition.
What are they?
They are trade secrets and we need up to one million bloggers in Nigeria for the social media boom coming next.
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