Nigeria: Social media enthusiasts hope platform will spur sports

Even as Nigeria is holding a social media week, many enthusiasts hopes that the platform will help spur sports to the next level.

The ‘social media week’ event was hosted in Lagos bringing together participants from different fields like politics, sports, fashion and entrepreneurship.

Some participants discussed how social media can change the fortunes of the country’s most beloved sport – football. Speaking in one of the session an hour before he resigned as Nigeria’s national team coach, Sunday Oliseh talked about how he used social media.

“I do a lot of contact with them through… via these and let’s not deceive ourselves, it’s also cheaper. If you have to make telephone calls sometimes it’s way more expensive especially if you’re trying to get in touch with your player who’s playing in Russia for instance, so it makes life a lot easier. But that notwithstanding, not every player is social media savvy so one has to like measure it the right way,” he said.

A hopeful Colin Udoh, a Nigerian journalist expressed his enthusiasm over the large platform social media has in the Africa’s largest population.

“You’ve got what? Over 92 million people on the Internet, 150 million people using mobile devices in this country so you want to tap into that resource. As much as they may be online as much as they are offline, they want to use that online model to get them to come offline to get to the stadiums to watch games so yes, 150 million mobile devices; that’s a huge market to tap into,” he said.

Nigeria had 15 million monthly active users on Facebook as of June 30 last year, all of them using mobiles to like, share and upload content on the social network.