A pioneer and renowned food blogger, Zubaida Abdel-Rahman, also known as the ‘Profession Foodie,’ has urged young entrepreneurs to take advantage of social media to create wealth.
According to her, trends all around indicate a transition into an era when digital marketing seems to have become more popular than traditional ways of marketing, pushing companies to spend more money on advertising on digital platforms than ever before.
Therefore, with these changes taking place, she emphasized that it creates new opportunities for businesses to generate additional revenue.
She attributed the impact social media has had across the globe eliminating geographical barriers as a huge factor contributing to these changes hence the need for youth-led businesses in the country to jump onto the platform and take advantage of the windfall.
“Social media has allowed what digital marketers call ‘influencers’ to create revenue streams significant enough to change an entire lifestyle within a short period of time,” she said.
The Professional Foodie advised Ghanaian youth to identify these digital advantages and adapt to the use of social media platforms to liberate unemployment, and poverty and reduce the high dependency ratio in the country.
She shared that for a brand to be recognized on social media to make money, there is the need to build trust, and create consistent and helpful content.
“Social media platforms are flooded with many types of content creators. A lot of consumers primarily check Instagram and TikTok to see what their favorite influencers are up to. This means founders have to intentionally create an online presence to turn followers into paying customers,” she mentioned.
Miss Zubaida stressed that for businesses to successfully leverage social media, it is very important to create trust, be relatable and consistent, and be transparent to build loyalty because loyal is a critical value for brand-customer relationship growth.
“Building trust and connecting with followers is one way to cultivate reliable clients. Showing a day-to-day life as a founder, giving followers access to exclusive events, and explaining the story of your brand, creates transparency that customers value. I genuinely think that people are past the stage of just seeing a business without the faces behind,” she said.
She recommended that the founders looking to grow in 2023, need to be mindful of the way social media and the economy work hand-in-hand today.
About Zubaida
Zubaida Abdel-Rahman is the founder of Zubzz.com, a budding food blogging platform that is four-year-old and influencing content creation in the space in the country.
She recently launched a new app Konnect Gh to help locate all the sizzling food places in Ghana. Starting as a food blogger aka, professional foodie, in 2018, Miss Zubaida built a beautiful space on social media, where she posts food reviews from five-star restaurants to local food vendors.
She began her career as a food blogger after a thread on Twitter brought her attention to the fact that there wasn’t enough information online for Ghanaians who liked to eat out. Things like menus weren’t available to help people budget properly, and building on that, she created Zubzz.com, a website that provided people with menus of over 200 restaurants, reviews, and recommendations on where to dine.
She currently has a combined following of almost 115,000 social media followers, and 50,000 website subscribers from 8 international countries, her favourite being Twitter where she averages 10 million engagements a month. Shortly after she began hotel reviews and international reviews, where she tours foreign countries for the best places to dine.
