Session 3: Content Types & Storytelling

Educational content teaches something useful and asks for nothing: how to choose, how to avoid a mistake, what a term means, what to check before buying. It builds trust, because someone who helps you before selling to you is presumed honest. It also gets saved and shared, which is how accounts grow without payment. For most small businesses this should be the largest share of what they post.

Promotional content sells: the product, the price, the offer, the deadline, the proof. It is necessary and it must be clear — hiding prices and forcing people to ask 'how much?' in the comments is a habit that costs sales, because most people will not ask. But an account that is only promotion is a shop window nobody returns to.

Entertaining content makes people feel something: humour, recognition, surprise, nostalgia. It builds familiarity and reach, because people share what entertains them. Its risk is that it can attract an audience that enjoys you and never buys, so it should support the other two rather than replace them.

A reasonable starting balance is roughly half educational, a quarter promotional, a quarter entertaining, adjusted as your numbers tell you what works. The reason for weighting education is that it is the type that earns the right to sell: by the time someone sees your offer, they have already had something useful from you and are not being asked to trust a stranger.

Adjust from evidence rather than theory. If educational posts get saves and shares but your promotional posts get nothing, your offers may be unclear rather than unwanted — check whether the price, the delivery and the way to buy are stated. If entertaining posts reach far more people but produce no enquiries, your entertainment may be attracting the wrong audience, and narrower content is better than wider content.

The mistake to avoid is the all-promotion account. It looks efficient — every post is a sale attempt — and it produces almost nothing, because nobody follows a shop window. The second mistake is the reverse: an account of tips and jokes with no clear route to buying, which builds an audience that enjoys you and never becomes customers.

A story works because it creates an open loop: something unfinished that the reader wants closed. The structure is simple and reliable. Start in the middle of the problem, not with an introduction. 'I lost ₦180,000 to a supplier who never delivered' holds attention; 'Good morning everyone, today I want to talk about suppliers' does not. Nobody is waiting for your introduction.

Then the tension — what went wrong, what was at stake, what you tried that failed. Tension is what keeps someone reading, and skipping it makes the story flat however good the ending. Then the turn — what changed, what you learned, what you did differently. Then the point — the one thing the reader should take away, stated plainly.

Keep it specific. 'A client' is forgettable; 'a woman in Surulere ordering forty Ankara styles for her sister's wedding' is not. Specific detail is what makes a story credible and memorable, and it is also what makes it recognisable — the reader thinks 'that is nearly me', which is the moment a stranger becomes a prospect. And keep it short: online attention is measured in seconds, so every sentence that does not earn the next one should go.

A caption has three jobs and only the first is visible. The hook is the first line, and on most feeds it is all anyone sees before deciding to keep reading — so it must be a claim, a question or a problem, never a greeting. 'Your generator is costing you more than a solar setup' is a hook. 'Hello dear customers' is not.

The body delivers one idea, in short lines. Long unbroken paragraphs do not get read on a phone; two-sentence paragraphs separated by space do. Write the way you would say it to a friend, not the way you would write a notice, because formal language signals advertising and advertising is scrolled past.

The call-to-action tells the reader exactly what to do next, and it must be one thing. 'Send the word BAG to our WhatsApp' works. 'Like, share, comment, follow and tag a friend' does not, because five requests produce none. State it plainly and make it small enough that doing it feels effortless — that is what converts a reader into a conversation.

A call-to-action fails for three reasons: it is absent (the reader enjoyed the post and did not know what to do), vague ('contact us' says nothing about how), or too large (asking a stranger to buy before asking them to ask). Match the ask to the relationship: a first-time reader should be invited to reply, save or ask a question; a warm follower can be invited to order.

The reliable CTAs for Nigerian small business are direct-message prompts ('Send the word PRICE and I will send our list'), a specific question that invites replies ('Which of these two would you wear to work?'), a save prompt for genuinely useful content, and a link to a page or catalogue. Note that a question that invites replies also increases distribution, because comments are a strong signal — so a good CTA does two jobs at once.

For producing ideas at volume, work from one customer problem to many pieces. A single problem — 'I cannot find work clothes that look expensive without overspending' — generates a buying guide, a mistake-avoidance post, a fabric comparison, a customer story, a behind-the-scenes post, a price-justification post and a seasonal offer. Ten problems give you seventy posts, which is several months of content, and every one of them is relevant to someone who might buy.