Facebook to Open its New Office in Nigeria

As part of its continued commitment and ongoing investment in Africa, Facebook (www.Facebook.com) today announced it will be opening an office in Lagos, Nigeria - its second office on the African continent. Aimed at supporting the entire Sub-Saharan Africa region, the office is expected to become operational in H2 2021 and will be the first on the continent to house a team of expert engineers building for the future of Africa and beyond.

Facebook’s office will be home to various teams servicing the continent from across the business, including Sales, Partnerships, Policy, Communications as well as Engineers.

Over the years, what was once just an online social network has become a “big owner” of internet infrastructure. This is at least the case in Africa, where 24% of the population still does not have a mobile internet subscription and where the Menlo Park giant has invested several hundred million dollars in connectivity projects over five years.

Commenting, Ime Archibong, Facebook's Head of New Product Experimentation said: “The opening of our new office in Lagos, Nigeria presents new and exciting opportunities in digital innovations to be developed from the continent and taken to the rest of the world. All across Africa we’re seeing immense talent in the tech ecosystem, and I’m proud that with the upcoming opening of our new office, we’ll be building products for the future of Africa, and the rest of the world, with Africans at the helm. We look forward to contributing further to the African tech ecosystem.”

The investment of the new Facebook office follows the 2018 opening of NG_Hub, its first flagship community hub space in Africa in partnership with CcHub, and the 2019 opening of a Small Business Group (SBG) Operations Centre in Lagos, in partnership with Teleperformance. Providing outsourced support to all English-speaking advertisers across Sub-Saharan Africa, the SBG office supports Small Medium Businesses (SMBs) through its Advocacy, Community & Education (ACE) programme, as well as its Marketing Expert sales programmes – all aimed at enabling SMBs to accelerate the growth and development of their businesses.

Reaching New Markets in Africa

“Our new office in Nigeria presents an important milestone which further reinforces our ongoing commitment to the region”, commented Kojo Boakye, Facebook’s Director of Public Policy, Africa. “Our mission in Africa is no different to elsewhere in the world - to build community and bring the world closer together, and I’m excited about the possibilities that this will create, not just in Nigeria, but across Africa.”

Since the opening of its first office in 2015, Facebook has made a number of investments across the continent, aimed at supporting and growing the tech ecosystem, expanding and providing reliable connectivity infrastructures and helping businesses to grow locally, regionally and globally. This includes the recent rollout of its SMB Grants programme in Nigeria and South Africa, aimed at supporting over 900 businesses by providing a combination of cash and ad credits to help small businesses as they rebuild from COVID. The development of 2Africa, the world’s largest subsea cable project that will deliver much needed internet capacity and reliability across large parts of Africa, as well as its ongoing training programmes across the continent which support various communities including students, SMBs, digital creatives, female entrepreneurs, start-up’s and developers. 

“In Africa, we are seeing explosive growth and incredible momentum across the region. At the same time, when you look at the staggering cost of connectivity in many countries, mobile services need to deliver maximum utility on the biggest range of devices and consume the smallest amount of data, which is exactly what Facebook provides.” says Rob Norman, Chief Digital Officer of Global Group M.

Nunu Ntshingila, Regional Director, Facebook Africa,said: “We’re delighted to be announcing our new office in Nigeria. Five years on from opening our first office on the continent in Johannesburg, South Africa, we’re continuing to invest in and support local talent, as well as the various communities that use our platforms. The office in Lagos will also be key in helping to expand how we service our clients across the continent.”

Internet Infrastructure in Africa

The latest – and most high-profile – is the 2Africa submarine cable. Funded by Facebook with consortium of international telecom operators, it is expected to surround the continent within three to four years and connect 16 African countries to the rest of the world.

On land, Facebook, which has been mapping network needs since 2016, is involved in highly localised projects in partnership with local operators. With an estimate that 45% of the sub-Saharan population lives more than 25 kilometres from a fiber optic node, the company has been installing  since 2017, 100 kilometres of cable laid with the operator Vast Network in Diepsloot and Katlehong, two municipalities located on the outskirts of Johannesburg.

• Facebook is building a 37,000-kilometer long undersea cable around Africa to provide it with better internet access.
• The subsea cable will interconnect 23 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, Facebook says.
• The move highlights increased interest from Silicon Valley companies in Africa.

A year later in Uganda, 770 kilometres of fibre were laid with the help of the Kenyan provider Bandwidth & Cloud Services Group (BCS) and the operator Airtel.

A primary goal of the initiative, Facebook says, is to bring increased connectivity to Africa. The continent is “currently the least connected” in the world, the company wrote in a blog post Wednesday, with just over a quarter of its population having internet access.

The subsea cable will interconnect 23 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Facebook states it will “provide nearly three times the total network capacity of all the subsea cables serving Africa today.”

Facebook said the 2Africa project was made more efficient by the use of aluminum rather than copper conductor material, as this could help increase network capacity. The company is now in the process of developing a new crossing linking the Red Sea with the Mediterranean, which it claims will be the first in that region in more than a decade.

Digital Marketing In Africa

If you work with digital marketing or campaign management, you probably have some clear goals for your digital presence: increased engagement, conversions and website page views, with content that works on any device. Specially so in the African market where buyers are looking for specific products to meet the growing demand  in their region.

As a result, this is an exciting time to be in digital marketing – there have never been more opportunities to provide outstanding experiences for your customers. At the heart of your digital experience is your owned media: your web and mobile sites. When redesigning or rebranding, however, there are a few challenges that need to be overcome.

One basic challenge is time. Another challenge is coordinating several marketing activities across diverse systems, channels and markets to provide a seamless experience for users. Ideally, you would be able to easily develop content for campaigns, landing pages and social media and launch it across several channels with a single click.

And have the system figure out what is most relevant to each visitor, which would convert leads faster and drive more prospects down the funnel.

Leads Generation Service: Business Leads From Africa

Africa Business Pages has launched a special Lead Generation Service that gets you upto 10 business inquiries from African buyers everyday. The special packages offered let companies target specific countries and audiences in Africa based on their products and services. Starting package costs as little as $550 per month and guarantees a minimum of 10 business leads from Africa every day.

You can also try the service for Trial Period of 7 days for just $99. After the trial period, if you are happy with the results, you can continue with the plan of your choice. The Africa Business Pages offers three plans to suit the requirements and budgets of various companies. These include:

• Silver Plan : US$750 per month (inclusive of all advertising expenses)
• Gold Plan : US$850 per month (inclusive of all advertising expenses)
• Platinum Plan : US$1,100 per month (inclusive of all advertising expenses)

Africa's B2B Portals to Promote Business in Africa

It would be great if you could sit in your chair and use your mind powers to make all of your campaigns magically align around the world. And simply by touching your fingertips together you could sense what your customers cared about, and understand why they continued their journey – or went away.

The trouble is that technology that is supposed to help us achieve this – in some small way – can be difficult to manage, and the data it produces hard to analyse and quickly act on.

The role of B2B portals like the Africa Business Pages can never be underplayed as they are recognised by Search Engines as useful hubs for information and therefore enjoy a higher search engine ranking – providing you with a direct link to your target audiences.

Email Marketing AfricaIn an ideal situation, you would be able to distribute content and promotions to the right channels, at the right time, to the right target market. After you publish the content on high ranking B2B portal like the Africa Business Pages, you would be able to easily respond to the campaign metrics – changing and tweaking the content so you can increase conversion rates and decrease the cost of leads. This is what agile marketing is all about.

Advertise in Africa

Create, orchestrate and optimise campaigns in real time. There are three elements crucial to any successful campaign – audience, message and timeliness. There are solutions like Featured Listings on the Africa Business Pages that enable you to launch new campaigns within hours of identifying a new opportunity.

By advertising on Africa Business Pages, you can easily target audiences, create personalised experiences within your campaigns, and engage visitors in mobile, social and email channels. Once ready, your campaigns are instantly pushed out across channels – web, mobile, social, email and instore kiosks, and you will begin collecting insights on campaign performance and visitor engagement.

Improve paid search conversions and organic search placement. For most businesses, organic search traffic is crucial to acquire new traffic and a cornerstone in an inbound marketing strategy. While most marketers know SEO, they struggle to achieve their organic acquisition goals.

Once again, Africa Business Pages comes in handy here by providing you a readymade SEO platform that helps you reach African buyers across various digital channels – web, mobile, social, email and B2B WhatsApp groups.

Africa Business Pages content is built around the visitor, and is inherently search-engine friendly with reusable content that attracts interest. As a leading content hub for Africa, the Africa Business Pages provide genuine value to the visitor, and built-in tools for marketers to optimise copy for better visibility and reach.

Africa Business Pages offers automate content marketing to drive loyalty and engagement. Regular email newsletters sent to registered users of Africa Business Pages offers excellent inbound email marketing once a lead has been acquired. Undoubtedly, email marketing is the foremost channel for lead nurturing, as well as an important component in customer loyalty programs. By sending personalised, high-converting and timely emails, Africa Business Pages ensures that you get the desired results from their email channel.

With Africa Business Pages dedicated digital marketing campaigns, we have fused together all the parts you need for a successful email campaign: compelling content, precise targeting and profile management, and the authoring and automation tools that let you focus on the message instead of the mechanics.

Digital Marketing Plans for African Markets

Africa Business Pages special Business Matchmaking program automatically presents content relevant to each visitor, and uses machine learning to optimise content presentation based on the behaviour and interests of the visitor.

Personalised content offered to users at Africa Business Pages helps advertisers achieve on average a 19 percent uplift in sales when using Africa Business Pages digital . At the same time, it is often time consuming and costly to create a multitude of content assets, text and image variations, and target them to the right audience.

Africa Business Pages Business Matchmaking program makes this process easy – it derives insights from each visitor’s behaviour, helps marketers select content for personalisation, and delivers actionable metrics on the performance and behaviour of different audiences.

The digital marketing team at Africa Business Pages helps you to achieve better business results through time-tested inhouse digital marketing activities and by employing latest techniques like pixel marketing and other digital marketing methods to target specific customers and customer segments.

Digital Marketing In African Markets

Digital marketing is not only about the opportunity to grow revenue, acquire new customers, and keep current customers loyal – it is also about streamlining operations.

Africa Business Pages has a digital presence that spans over 25 years and is one of the leading B2B portals for African businesses. The Africa Business Pages has accumulated consumer data over 25 years and has the advantage of a comprehensive database of African buyers – segmented by location and business activity.

Africa Business Pages has a dedicated digital marketing team that has proven skills to increase operational efficiencies drastically, by reducing time spent on experience management, authoring and running campaigns, efficiently supporting internal operations, and connecting into back-end business systems.

As digital marketing and digital commerce usually involve several different systems and environments, the digital marketing team at Africa Business Pages is well versed with all environments and ensures optimal performance and offers shorter response times.

By hiring the digital marketing team at Africa Business Pages to reach African buyers, you can instead focus on creating experiences for your customers, not on complicated infrastructure and processes. And since global scalability is built in, you don’t need to worry about traffic peaks, new markets or changing needs – the Africa Business Pages platform is always on, and always ready for customers.