On every episode of Behind the Scenes, we bring you major marketers across various sectors. They walk us through the hurdles they face in their line of work, the process behind the work, blockers, work-life balance and pretty much anything else that happens behind the scenes of their public work.
For this episode, we had Chiamaka Amaku, Social Media Lead at Flutterwave, one of the biggest Fintechs in Africa. Chiamaka is an authentic travel and lifestyle creator, a businesswoman who stumbled upon marketing. Now she leads social media at Flutterwave and is responsible for their social media presence globally. Interested in knowing how this “authentic babe” pulls her weight as a creative and a 9-5er in one of the biggest Fintechs in Africa? Follow through with the interview.
PS: If this interview series is not your cup of tea, that’s sad (we can’t say it’s okay). Here’s something else we think you will love:
How would you describe yourself?
I would describe myself as a doer which is crazy because I didn’t use to think I was one of those “doing” people.
What did you want to be when you were younger?
I wanted to be a medical doctor. But you see, the thing with future aspiration is that it is stacked with projections from your parents, peers or siblings.
I wasn’t given the chance to get to know myself, to sit with myself and ask what I really wanted.
That must have been hard for you as a child
It wasn’t pleasant. I didn’t meet myself until I was 24 years old. So the dream to be a medical doctor wasn’t mine, it was that of my parent. For context, I was smart, I aced my studies. It’s just a thing in my place where they say “If you know book, you go become doctor”.
So what did your tech journey look like?
A very interesting one.
I did not intentionally want to work in tech. It all began when I started a business in Uni in 2016. I was buying and selling bundles to students around. I went to a school where students could afford to buy hair out of their pocket money.
What school was that?
Igbenedion University. I went to Igbenedion first. That was where I started studying medicine. I was two years in when my school lost accreditation and my parents would not pay school fees for me to study physiology because that’s what the school asked me to switch my course to.
It was insane. Anyway, my parents asked me to apply to another school. The closest was the University of Benin (Uniben). In a strange twist of events, I would have gone to Cyprus to study medicine. Maybe wake up one day and realize that the life I was living wasn’t the one I chose.
Where was I going?
How you got into tech
Yeah, so I started this business and it opened me up to creativity. Before that, I used to read and write a lot but it was my business that encouraged me to do a deep dive into selling. And with the evolution of consumerism and consumption, selling also changed. From going door to door to sell bundles, having some people slam the door in my face and others buy. I pushed them to follow the brand on social media and grew my customer base.
I had to learn to target the right kind of people who had the purchasing power to buy my goods. I also had to learn how to put what was interesting in front of their faces so I could stay relevant to them.
Then I had this friend, he went to Uniben as well. By the way, I did not end up studying medicine there. At the time, he was writing for tech blogs in 2018. He encouraged me to pursue a career because according to him, I was good at digital marketing, specifically social media.
At that time, I was serving as a bookstore manager at an NGO, waiting to be done so I could fully focus on my business because that was what was sustaining me. At the company I was working for, I was also managing their social media but they were not paying me jackpot for it.
Still, within that company, I grew. From social and content manager, I grew to communications manager. I was a natural at these roles and it tracks because when I look back at all the writing I did as a teenager, that’s how everything came to bloom. A year into my career, I still had not decided what I wanted my career to be. I had already led an African NGO and we had organized one festival that was the biggest in Africa at the time. I led the communication for that festival.
One thing about good work is that it speaks for you, It speaks for itself and it speaks for you. After that people were just rushing me. The next place I worked was in an automation technology company and then a little later, where I am right now.
Quite an interesting journey. Right now, you’re a social media manager at Flutterwave, what does your day-to-day look like?
My day-to-day is crazy! I manage a team so I usually do team check-ins and if we have content to push on different arms, I oversee that.
Different arms?
Yeah. We appear as a unit but it’s so many moving parts and I’m primarily responsible for the global brand. So if there’s anything we need to push on the global brand or amplify or any event we’re doing, I’m on that.
So my day-to-day isn’t fixed. It’s not as set in stone as my previous jobs. For instance, if we post regularly, I’d have to go through the content, approve the caption and then post. I still do all of that here but there’s a lot more unexpected stuff. Ironically. I’m doing more comms than I’ve ever done. There’s a reason I left communications and it was because I find it boring.
Let’s talk about that for a bit. Why do you think it’s boring?
It’s a personal opinion. I think it’s too repetitive for a creative person like me. I like to be behind the scenes. A part of the team that films videos and tells stories. Storytelling is my marketing approach, communications is not.
And that’s because even though communication is a part of storytelling, it’s a little boring if you can’t personalize it. I want to be able to turn all of that boring long talk into compelling videos that someone somewhere in Indonesia or wherever can consume and be mindblown.
Beefing with comms?
Lol. I really can’t explain it. I feel like you’re allowed more creative freedom outside it. You can turn things that people will usually give just one glance into something worthwhile and captivating. I had to abandon my comms career. It meant taking a pay cut because obviously in the hierarchy of marketing, a communications manager is higher than a social media or community manager. It’s important that I enjoy what I do if not I won’t be able to do it. If I was still doing comms, I probably would have abandoned my entire career, honestly.
What’s the hardest part of the job for you?
The hardest part of the job for me is the hyper exposure and I know it sounds ironic because I have this personal brand and I’m very in people’s faces but if you were to check about me before Flutterwave, I wasn’t vocal about my career. I’d just do great work and let it pass. Only people who were hiring, were in my circle or I had worked for knew about my work. And in fact, that’s how I got this job, by referral. I digress.
I manage a LinkedIn page that has over 200,000 followers. If you make a post, it shows posted by XYZ. Do you know how many people are on my LinkedIn? It’s crazy. There are also events. Today it’s one event in Amsterdam, one in America and other places. And with events, you have to be on the job.
Since we’re on the subject of “hardest”. You’re a creative, an influencer, plus you run businesses. Businesses for which you were nominated for Bumpa’s top 100 business women in 2023. How do you manage all of that?
Routines. I wake up at 5am, hit the gym between 5:30am to 6am, back home by 7:40am. If I’m late 8. I do my morning routine, make my tea, take my shower, and settle down to work. Thankfully, I work from home most times. When it’s time for lunch breaks, I have lunch and attend to business needs. My assistant would have already prepped what needs to be done. Maybe send hairs to a particular location, call a dispatch rider or something.
I also schedule everything. Spa days, calls to my friends, family and everyone else I need to speak to.
Through all of this, I’m still a personal brand that I’m trying to grow so I’m thinking of content ideas, pushing content on my social media pages. So routines are a must for me, whenever I miss out on one thing, I feel out of place because I have messed with the routine. Let me tell you, routines will save your life!
What’s the most successful social media campaign you’ve worked on so far? If you could share the results we don’t mind.
The most successful one would be our trade fair campaign last year. We did a series of short videos. One was part of our small business community and we had to talk about what would be and what to expect.
For the first time, we did a twist to the trade fair. We had a fashion competition and a runway show and we asked the judges to do intro videos as part of the trade fair rollout. It was fun and cute, plus the content did really well. One of the trade fair videos got over 100k views on Instagram. I just remembered another one.
Which one?
Brag about yourself. It wasn’t necessarily a campaign. What my team wanted to achieve with that was to bring Fluterwave back. It wasn’t top of mind the way it used to be before especially on Twitter. If you were calling payment giants, you would call Flutterwave before Paystack. We wanted to revive that.
Twitter is the place that drives conversation. Brag About Yourself was insanely successful, it was one of those question prompts that either start a conversation or boost engagement for the brand. But for me, it’s more than the numbers but the ripple effect. The impact.
People got stuff as a result of the tweet. There was a teacher, her own Brag About Yourself was that they had never increased her salary in years, she never went on leave and other stuff, I can’t remember. People on Twitter went crazy with it and started to contribute money and other stuff to her.
They got someone else a laptop. We eventually supported that teacher but the ripple effect of that single tweet? Just how many words? Three. It got over 40 million views. About 42 million impressions and something around 5 million interactions. It was insane.
Since we are on numbers and metrics, which ones do you consider important?
Each of them have their very unique feature and why they are important but the most important for me is the conversation. What are people saying about what you have said? The responses, quotes, bookmarks and the replies. I don’t judge quotes because they can be haters and totally irrelevant to what you’re saying.
People do that quote thing when they are trying to sound like an authority or buttress their points but the replies? If you see direct replies telling you something is bullshit, you should listen to them. It might be bullshit. If they’re saying it’s a great then most likely it is. If it is mixed then you should wait and see what the percentage of both sides are.
The metric is so you can listen to what people are saying and do more of what they want. It’s a means to an end.
Do you have a process when it comes to content creation?
I do have a process.
We first start with research. For example, we have a content calendar planned out till the end of the year. More like outlined. So we know what the calendar should look like, then we start filling it up. The first thing we fill up is the holiday because as a global brand, you have to recognize all observable holidays, especially in the countries that you’re present.
Then we have brainstorming meetings and, Ideation meetings. All of that to come up with ideas and flesh it. After that, we fill it with all the other pillars of what our social content looks like. Then split them into product content and other categories. For example if that particular month, we’re launching something or announcing something, products will take a higher percentage. That’s it.
There’s a lot of yap about whether or not no-code side of tech is crucial to product growth. So I’ll ask directly, how crucial has social media been to Flutterwave’s growth?
Say, you just came into the country or you’re trying to just do a transaction or say you’re a business owner who doesn’t know how to receive funds locally from international clients. Maybe you’ve asked for recommendations but you’re still not sure which to go for. You come on Twitter and every day on your timeline, there’s that same set of recommendations maybe Flutterwave and Paystack. So now you’re split for choice, confused in fact.
One day or that week alone you see three tweets from Flutterwave and they’re all positive tweets, you check the reactions and it’s positive. That gives you an inkling. It’s not complex. Automatically, you’re going to choose that option.
Expatiate on that
Okay. What happens is that there is a sensitization that happens on social media. Whether you like it or not, you’re going to see things. The fact that Flutterwave came up as part of the recommendations means that a whole number of people have been sensitized to see that Flutterwave exists and is doing good work. You can’t go one by one to millions of people physically and talk to them about Flutterwave. A good percentage of that sensitization was done through social media. That is 1000% crucial to product growth.
Then we move to inciting the action of using the product because you have heard about it. Seeing actual posts from the company and positive reactions to the product, you will feel inclined to use it to solve your problem, which by the way is an actual need. You will not even know when your hand will be diverting towards Flutterwave 😂 😂
Then there’s social impact, especially with the advent of TikTok. What the product and quality do for people. For instance, the Stanley Cup incident where one lady’s car got burnt and only the Stanley Cup survived unhurt and still very much cold. Stanley Cup became a thing. I have one now. The company got her a car. Whether it was a marketing ploy or not. They milked that. The social impact of that singular occurrence probably covered their marketing budget for at least a quarter.
Saw one tweet somewhere, it said marketing is why people prefer Piggyvest to Cowrywise. I can’t remember the exact words but you see the social impact: “I saved for my first car on Piggyvest”. You see that and you want to save for something worthwhile too. That’s social impact directly affecting growth. The impact of utilizing social media to share what matters about the product and the people it’s serving.
One hack for social media managers, what would it be?
You need to be flexible and adaptable to the times. You cannot be rigid as a social media manager. It doesn’t even go together. Things change, apps you’re good at, they wake up and change things. Can I add another?
Sure thing
Always be online. You need to be chronically online, I’m sorry. In fact sorry for your mental health but you just have to be. You can’t be a social media manager and your online time is low. You’re playing.
What’s one thing you’d like to tell marketers?
A lot of people don’t like hearing this one. Most roles are intertwined, you have to learn to apply yourself and be flexible. I earlier said I don’t like comms. I am doing some comms right now, as well as video directing, script writing and other stuff. Which are not part of social media management.
Sometimes you might have to write blogs, do PR or be the customer representative for a minute or two. Apply yourself and do it. These skills may not benefit you directly or the space you’re in at the moment but when you get to where it will, you’ll remember and be like “Damn, I learnt this doing XYZ somewhere”.
Sign out the way you would if you were in your favourite vacation spot, with zero worries
Keep being the bad boys and girls that you are 😂 😂. But yeah, thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed this interview so much.
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