Kenyan start-up Wowzi, which makes scalable influencer campaigns, has announced plans to enter Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa this year.

Wowzi creates distributed messaging campaigns for clients, utilising thousands of real, everyday customers and fans who get paid to offer authentic endorsements online.

The company said on Saturday (November 20) that so far it has signed up 60,000 influencers in the East African Region, primarily by word of mouth, and carried out 10,000 campaigns for over 150 clients.

Speaking at Wowzi’s official launch in the East African market, co-founder and chief executive Brian Mogeni said companies are increasingly aligning marketing strategies to tap into micro and nano content creators (with 250 to 5000 followers) looking to monetise their social media accounts.

“Now that Wowzi has created the technology platform to efficiently distribute and manage job offers to thousands of youths at a time, brands have an opportunity to engage directly with youth and offer meaningful gig work,” he said, announcing plans to enter Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa this year.

“Engagement on posts by nano-influencers is nearly three times higher than celebrity personalities... As a result, nano and micro influencers with smaller, more intimate and engaged followers deliver better qualified sales leads,” Mogeni said. 

East Africa has 20mn social media users, according to Hootsuite's Digital 2021 Data Report. Kenya leads the pack with 11mn social media users (20.2% of the population), followed by Tanzania at 5.4mn (8.9%) and Uganda with about 3.4mn (7.3%).

Wowzi said it aims to create 1mn gig jobs for African youth in 2022 through its online marketplace, after having delivered over 150,000 so far in 2021.