Memo to Nigeria’s social media-shy CEOs (2)

Here is one of the most successful African entrepreneurs sharing, directly, not by some assistant, his entrepreneurial journey on Facebook. He does that from time to time and also takes his time to answer random questions from readers. With almost 800,000 followers, Masiyawa’s wall passes for an MBA class on Facebook!

One trend I have observed is that while executives in other climes are opening up on the internet, writing articles, sometimes casually, on their experience running companies, or using twitter to drop nuggets on management, Nigerian executives do not appear to be ready to catch the bug. LinkedIn, for example, has a special platform, called LinkedIn Pulse, that allows influential users to publish articles. Prominent users of this channel include Bill Gates of Microsoft; Jack Welsh, former CEO of GE; Jim Kim, president of the World Bank, to mention a few. I’m not aware of any A-list Nigerian CEO that has published an article on LinkedIn.

Richard Branson of Virgin Group, known for maintaining a personal blog where he shares his views on entrepreneurship and management, was once asked by curious readers whether he is the one that actually writes those articles and posts attributed to him, and he replied that he writes most of them. Branson is also active on twitter.

Nigerian executives are still largely social media-shy. Most of them actually have authentic social media accounts (as opposed to those opened by impostors with their names – which are easy to detect anyway), but they refuse to be active.

A few are however relatively active. Fola Adeola, founder of Guaranty Trust Bank, tweets like once in a week, mostly on politics and sometimes on football. His tweets are usually short and humour-laden. Former CEO of United Bank for Africa, Tony Elumelu, is more active on twitter. With a little over 120,000 followers, the proponent of Africapitalism is probably Nigeria’s answer to Masiyawa, as his tweets are usually business-related motivational quotes. I don’t know whether he posts those tweets himself or he gets some media manager do it, but the tweets appear like those personally written.

Oando CEO, Wale Tinubu, who came to the twitter game quite late, may however be the game-changer as he appears to be more involved than almost everyone else. The oil magnate uses twitter to share news bordering on his company as well as pictures of some of his business activities. More remarkably, he gets organized twitter and Google hangouts where people get to ask him questions on his company. I think that is a good idea.

Africa’s richest man and one of Masiyawa’s business idols, from the way the Zimbabwean regularly makes reference to him in his social media interventions, Aliko Dangote, is actually on twitter and, in fact, got twitter bubbling the day he joined last year, but it does appear the Kano-born billionaire is a per-quarter user of social media. His posts are so few and far between.

If using twitter and Facebook are still unattractive to our executives, then it is no surprise that they have not taken (and may never take) to blogging to express their views and share their management philosophies. I know of only one top executive, Iquo Ukoh, executive director, marketing services, Nestle Nigeria, that blogs. She runs a blog where she discusses food recipe.

There is a common perception in Nigeria that only the ‘jobless’ youths are active on social media; that people that frequently express their views through blogs, Facebook and twitter have nothing to do with their lives. Now, I wonder whether Richard Branson or Steve Masiyawa are also not busy.

This is why I think Nigerian executives need to come out and join the social media train, if not for entertainment purpose (and that’s not a bad purpose), at least for educative purpose. We need them to connect with us and tell us their stories. It doesn’t hurt.

Suraj Oyewale