By Dayo Ibitoye


With the recent launch of its advertising platforms, ‘the 2go Ad Platform and 2go Market Research’, popular mobile social network and IM, 2go has proven to the world its dire quest to dominate the African market.


The company has in the last one year spent a lot on building advertising platforms and help brands engage with their users in a targeted but non-invasive way.


The 2go Ad Platform enables brands and advertising agencies to target and engage with 2go’s growing base of young savvy users. 2go Market Research on the other hand leverages the power of the 2go community to conduct real-time surveys and polls that deliver actionable insights with immediate value to clients. There is a Splash Screen Ad when you log in, also there is an Interactive Text Ads inside the app that appears as a contact.




According to Ricardo Pasqualotto, the Africa Sales Manager of 2go, the company’s most successful advertising unit is the premium full-screen clickable splash screen ad.


“The experience of this feature for a user is much more engaging than a normal banner or text based ad. The splash ad is more akin to seeing an advert in a cinema, where it is high quality and the user is highly engaged in the experience, rather than a small banner or text based ad, which is more of a distraction or afterthought for users”.


He said the company already has some brands on the ad platforms which include McDonalds, Vodacom, KFC and Standard Bank (Stanbic Nigeria).



2go focuses on emerging markets, where users chat and share photos with friends and family; meet new people and chat and play games in chat rooms.

2go has over 20m registered users across South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria of which 9m are active in Nigeria and 1.5m in South Africa. This statistics shows that Nigeria has become the platform’s biggest market globally overtaking South Africa. Still, 2go is getting more and more popular, even on search engines.


In Google Zeitgeist 2010, Facebook was toppled by 2go, in terms of search volume and the term, “2go” became the fastest rising search query in Nigeria during that year.

Ricardo also said over 6 billion messages are sent over the 2go network every month.

What is the future of the platform in Nigeria and Africa at large?
Ricardo told DIB “We will continue to focus on emerging markets in Nigeria which is our biggest market right now and Africa in general. Also we are targeting other countries like India and Brazil”.



“Considering that Nigeria alone has a population of 160m there is still plenty of opportunity for growth. We’re just getting started, we will continue to focus on our core social offering; continuously improve the user experience and add more features (constantly investigating ways to better design our app for our target consumer base).



“This also means evolving with our users as they shift from feature to smart phones. We are currently focused on developing native Android and Blackberry apps. Ricardo said.


There is therefore no doubt that as a growing youth social media platform, 2go is perfectly positioned to give any brand the correct exposure.

For brand advertisement, you can reach Ricardo on riccardo@2go.im

http://dayoibitoye..com/2013/02/exclusive-2go-advertising-platforms-set.html

Naija no they take last . . .
Imagine overtaking host country with a whooping 7.5 million user base gap!
The South African company really nid to restrategize its marketing policies in Nigeria, the nigerian market is very large . . . .
Proudly naija

Chai . . . Thats the Result of Hard-work.