Thursday 14 November 2019

5 Exciting 

Reasons Why You Should

 Start A Business in Africa’s Agribusiness 

industry… NOW!

Wednesday 13 November 2019

Woman, 19, gives birth in a French nightclub after partying till 5.30am... and her child is given free entry for life



Woman, 19, gives birth in a French nightclub after partying till 5.30am... and her child is given free entry for life 

French teenager  had the club experience of her life when she gave birth to a baby on a nightclub dance floor surrounded by revellers and bouncers.
The unidentified 19-year-old had been out partying until 5.30am on Monday when she suddenly went into labour.  
The incident took place at the O'Club on the Agde road in the southern French city of Toulouse, the capital of the Occitanie region.  
According to local media, the club's staff assisted with the birth. They then announced that the tot could have free entry to the club for life to mark the unusual moment.
A French teenager had the club experience of her life when she reportedly gave birth to a baby on O'Club dance floor (pictured) in France, surrounded by revellers and bouncers in the early hours of Monday morning
A French teenager had the club experience of her life when she reportedly gave birth to a baby on O'Club 
Marie-Helene, the club's manager, told local media that 'it was 5.30am, when we close'
She added: 'There were not many people and a bouncer came to see me. He said "It's urgent". I then saw that she was giving birth.'
The bouncer had reportedly seen the young woman lie down among the clubbers and realised she was about to have a baby. The club's staff then called an ambulance.

Marie-Helene said: 'We had to react quickly. An employee was on the phone with the emergency services who told us what to do.'
According to reports, the young woman had gone to the club for what was described as 'a change of scene due to personal problems.' 
She had been invited along by a friend and reportedly did not consume any alcohol.
The tot was reportedly born on the dance floor surrounded by people on a night out. 
Mother and child are reportedly in good health.  The gender of the baby is currently unclear.


7 Ways to Use Facebook for Marketing

7 Ways to Use Facebook for Marketing

Megan Marrs
Megan Marrs
Social Media
Facebook continues to be the reigning champ of social media sites, as the #1 spot where friends connect and share online. More than just a meeting place for friends, Facebook has grown into a venue for businesses to market themselves through interaction with customers and self-promotion.
In this post, we will be looking at seven ways you can use Facebook for marketing.
Whether you’re a big corporation or small local biz, Facebook is a powerful marketing tool – it’s a great space to keep customers informed, develop the brand identity, and broaden your reach.

1. Making the Most of Your Facebook Business Page

A Facebook page is a great free marketing tool for businesses. These pages let businesses identify themselves – not just through listing product offerings and services, but also by sharing links, images, and posts on a customizable page to give a better sense of a business’s personality and character.
facebook business page shop now button
Your Facebook business page is a great spot to develop your brand identity and show your human side. Facebook is where you can loosen the tie a bit – don’t be afraid to be funny.
Ultimately you should consider what your key audience would want to see. Share social media images, links, videos, anything, as long as it is connected to your business and it seems like something your target audience would enjoy.
In addition to hilarious videos of dogs walking in tiny shoes, a store specializing in footwear might also post an article about how to measure your foot size accurately, what kind of shoe inserts are best for different sore feet woes, etc. A nice mix of humor, educational resources, and posts about your store updates is ideal.

2. Facebook Advertising: Classic Ads

Facebook offers its own form of advertising with Facebook ads, which appear in the side columns of the Facebook site. These classic ads are referred to more specifically as Marketplace Ads. They include a headline with a copy, an image, and a click-through link to either a Facebook page, a Facebook app, or an outside website.
Facebook Marketing
Implementing Facebook advertising into your Facebook marketing strategy is one possible technique for increasing likes or driving website clicks.
Facebook advertising features include:
  • Demographic targeting by Facebook user data on age, location, education, and interests.
  • The ability to set ad budgets.
  • Ad testing, in which multiple ad versions can be run simultaneously to compare ad designs and setup.
  • Built-in ad performance measurement tools.
Facebook doesn’t release information about their ad CTRs, so it’s difficult to know how successful Facebook ads really are. In our Facebook Ads vs Google Display Ads Infographic, we found that Facebook ads generally have a CTR of 0.051%, and an average CPC of $0.80; however, a business’s Facebook advertising cost can vary a lot depending on the targeting options set and competition.
Using Facebook advertising to increase your “Likes” can be very beneficial – once a user likes your page, they essentially become followers of your business page, and your posts will appear on their Facebook news feed.
This results in more users interacting with you and your brand, forming relationships that may end up translating to conversions in the future.

3. Hosting Facebook Contests

Running Facebook contests, sweepstakes, or promotions is another Facebook marketing tactic that can increase fans and brand awareness.
When conducting a Facebook contest, be aware that contests can’t be hosted through Facebook itself (meaning you can’t ask for likes as entries, have people write answers in the comments, etc.) Businesses must use a third-party app for creating their Facebook contest, then direct users to the app from their Facebook page.
Facebook Marketing Contests
There are plenty of paid tools to help you do this, as well as some free ones. Shortstack offers several free contest templates, so long as your page has under 2,000 likes. Pagemodo also has a free option. Many third-party Facebook contest apps offer free versions, but your options with them are limited.

4. Facebook Promoted Posts

Facebook Promoted Posts let Facebook page owners pay a flat rate to have their individual Facebook posts reach a certain number of users, increasing a specific post’s reach and impressions.
Promoted Facebook Post
Some businesses have asked – why should I have to pay to ensure that my post is seen by users who are my followers? If a user has liked my page, they should always see my posts on their news feed, shouldn’t they? The answer to this question is no because it assumes that users spend every waking moment of their life on Facebook’s news feed. For the health and safety of your Facebook fans, we hope this isn’t true!
If a fan of yours happens to be looking at their news feed when you post your story, they are likely to see it, but even then there is no guarantee if their news feed is swamped by other posts. That’s where Promoted Posts comes in – it ups your chances of being seen on a user’s news feed. Facebook Promoted Posts are shown to existing fans, with an added option to reach friends of fans.
Promoted Posts are easy to set up – just click the button beneath any of your page posts.
While the flat rate simplifies the process, Promoted Posts lack the targeting options offered by other Facebook ads.

5. Sponsored Stories

Sponsored Stories are a type of Facebook ad that shows a user’s interactions, such as a Facebook like, to the user’s friends.
Sponsored Stories seeks to capitalize on the “word of mouth” marketing concept. If a user sees that three of his friends like a certain page, he is more inclined to pay attention. The goal of Sponsored Stories is to have a user take the same action as their friends. Advertisers can choose to show friends “likes” if they want more page likes, show friends who have “claimed this offer” if a business wants more users to claim offers, etc.
Facebook Sponsored Story Marketing
While the action performed by a friend liking a page or claiming an offer is automatically posted in a user’s news feed, these posts easily get overlooked. Sponsored Stories get preferred positioning, capable of appearing in news feeds and the right sidebar. Sponsored Stories is also the only ad format available on mobile devices.
Sponsored Stories don’t only apply to likes or offer – they can be used with any Facebook Open Graph app. If a friend has just installed Scramble With Friends on Facebook, Sponsored Stories can show users that their friend has just played the Scramble game, with an invite to “challenge them,” “play with them,” or any similar variation.
Facebook claims that Sponsored Stories have 46% higher CTRs and 20% lower CPCs than regular Facebook ads, making them a very serious strategy for marketing on Facebook.
Facebook Sponsored Stories can be created easily through the Facebook ad create flow. Open Graph Sponsored Stories with a customized call to action to require advertisers to use a third-party provider.

6. Facebook Open Graph

Facebook Open Graph lets businesses label a user’s action with their app. Billions of interactions are posted with Facebook Open Graph every day.
Businesses can create third-party apps that connect to a user and post a notice on Facebook when a user performs a specific action with the app. Facebook’s Open Graph allows for creative interactive options outside of the standard “like” and “comment.” Posts can suggest that users “listen,” “taste,” “read,” – it’s up to businesses to get creative.
Virtually any time a site or app prompts users to sign in to Facebook, it has something to do with connecting the user with the Facebook Open Graph.
Spotify is a great example of how Facebook Open Graph becomes a powerful Facebook marketing tool.
It all starts with a Facebook login prompt.
Spotify for Facebook Marketing
This is followed immediately by a permission request, which many users click through with little thought. I actually discovered that I had given permissions to 130 apps, 95% of which I don’t recall the reasoning behind.
Facebook Spotify
Once permission has been obtained, Spotify can stream what songs a user is listening to on a friend’s news feed.
Spotify Facebook Marketing
Pic borrowed from Justin Lafferty of AllFacebook.com
Notice that users are given a variety of options – they can like the song their friend is listening to, listen to the song themselves, or star it as a favorite in Spotify.
Open graph actions like these are unique enough to stand out from the cluttered craziness of a user’s news feed.
Many Facebook games make frequent use of Facebook open graph actions, posting a notice when a user has completed a level or won an achievement.
Farmville Marketing
Farmville. Oh, joy.
Open graph actions are being categorized as a new type of consumer story, taking advantage of the word of mouth phenomenon. Open graph posts are more meaningful to users because they are being generated by a familiar friend, not simply a brand, making them the latest and greatest of Facebook marketing tools.

7. Facebook Exchange (FBX)

Facebook Exchange lets advertisers take advantage of ad retargeting on Facebook through real-time bidding. Advertisers can target audiences based on web history data – when a user visits a product page on a retailer’s website but fails to make a purchase, the retailer can then display an ad for that same product on Facebook with FBX.
While Facebook retargeting ads were only relegated to the side columns, recently these ads have been allowed to appear in news feeds, the most valuable Facebook real-estate. This is great news for FBX advertisers since response rates for news feed ads are 10 to 50 times higher than that of ad placements in the right column.
Facebook Exchange Marketing
So how do Facebook Exchange ads perform? The CTR for Facebook Exchange ads is 40% lower than for other web retargeting ads, like those offered by the Google Display Network. Other retargeting ads are also cheaper, with price per unique clicks costing 80% less than Facebook retargeting ads. Still, in terms of cost-per-impression and cost-per-click, FBX ads are considerably cheaper, so the monetary benefits depend on your business’s needs. These numbers are also subject to change as FBX ads begin to appear more often in the news feed.
nwopoponpo@gmail.com

Tuesday 17 September 2019

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The evolution of African clothing


The evolution of African clothing is difficult to trace because of the lack of historical evidence. Although artifacts from Egyptian culture date back to before 3000 B.C.E., no similar evidence is available for the majority of the African continent until the mid-twentieth century. 


Sources from Arab culture refer to the people of northern Africa by the eighth century C.E., but much of early African clothing history has been pieced together from art, oral histories, and traditions that are continued by present-day tribal members. When Europeans began trading and later developed colonies in Africa starting in the thirteenth century C.E., more information about how Africans dressed was recorded and continues to this day. The spotty information available, combined with the huge number of different cultures living in Africa, however, provides an only a very general history of the clothing trends on the continent
Clothing was not a necessity for warmth or protection throughout much of the African continent because of the consistently warm weather. Many people, especially men, did not wear any clothing at all and instead decorated their bodies with paint or scars. When Africans did wear clothing, evidence suggests that animal skins and bark cloth were the first materials used. It is unknown when these readily available materials were first utilized, but they were used to make simple aprons to cover the genitals or large robes to drape around the body.


Later many cultures developed weaving techniques to produce beautiful cloth. Raffia, the fiber of a palm plant, and cotton were common materials used to weave fabric. At first, the cloth was woven by hand, and later looms (weaving devices) were created to make more complicated fabrics. Men and women worked together to produce fabric for clothing, with men weaving the fabric and women decorating it in many cultures. Perhaps the most well-known fabrics were the intricately woven cotton or silk Kente cloth of Ghana; the mud cloth of Mali, with its distinctive brown and beige patterns; and the tufted Kuba cloth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Other types of cloth were also woven by other groups; each culture using its distinctive cloth to create clothing. 

Some used their fabric to create elaborate wrapped clothing styles, similar to the toga worn by ancient Romans. Others cut and sewed their fabric into skirts, shirts, dresses, and loose trousers. Different versions of loose-fitting robes are worn in many different regions of Africa. In Nigeria and Senegal, a robe called a boubou for men and a boubou for women is popular. Other similar robes include the agbada and Riga in Nigeria, the gandoura or leppi in Cameroon, and the dashiki in West Africa. Styles in northern Africa reflect the strong influence Muslims have had on the cultures, especially the Berbers of Morocco and other Saharan desert countries.
Read more: http://www.fashionencyclopedia.com/fashion_costume_culture/Early-Cultures-African/Clothing-of-African-Cultures.html#ixzz5zjLudl1D




By 800 C.E., the Ghanaian empire began to flourish due to the development of extensive trade routes in Northern Africa and the discovery of gold throughout the region. Many smaller groups developed into communities in Southern Africa as a result. The Malian empire became large and powerful after the fall of the Ghanaian people in 11 C.E. By 1200 C.E. Mali was the largest empire in West Africa and profoundly influenced the region’s culture through the spread of its language, laws, and customs. Mali wore hand-printed cloths called Bogolanfini or mud cloth. Each cloth had arrangements of symbols revealing something secret about its intended meaning. The language of the cloth was passed down from mother to daughter along with specific motifs. Men were responsible for weaving the narrow strips of plain fabric that were pieced together into a larger rectangular cloth.




Meanwhile, in Southern Uganda, Barkcloth was being crafted by the Baganda people of Uganda during the 15th century. Barkcloth was one of the first fabrics made by mankind; using an ancient technique that predates the invention of weaving. Serving as a versatile fabric, the cloth was used to produce loincloths, skirts, draperies, wall hangings, and even bedding. Barkcloth is harvested from the locally grown Mutaba tree without bringing harm to the tree. The long history of the production of barkcloth among Uganda’s indigenous population provides a great pre-historic example of how to utilize our environment’s renewable resources. Nevertheless, the art of bark cloth making is slowly disappearing to modern convinces. In 2005, UNESCO declared bark cloth making to be a masterpiece of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.





Ankara also known as “Real Dutch Wax” originates from the European replication of batiks from the far east during the early 19th century. Batiks are a printed fabric with designs on both sides of the cloth. Initially, marketed to the Dutch-East Indies as “Java prints,” the Ankara fabric has a crossbred cultural background that finds its historical roots in present-day Indonesia. It has been theorized that West African men conscripted to the Dutch army bought batik fabrics home. The European Companies such as Vlisco, HKM, and ABC Wax began to tailor designs according to African tastes and demands that included colorful cloths and tribal patterns/ motifs. Currently, imitation wax fabrics are made locally and also imported from Asia, both ubiquitously exemplify African fashion. However, a question of Ankara fabrics African authenticity is a subject of much debate. What do you think?



Clothing was not a necessity for warmth or protection throughout much of the African continent because of the consistently warm weather. Many people, especially men, did not wear any clothing at all and instead decorated their bodies with paint or scars. When Africans did wear clothing, evidence suggests that animal skins and bark cloth were the first materials used. It is unknown when these readily available materials were first utilized, but they were used to make simple aprons to cover the genitals or large robes to drape around the body.


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