In conversation with Yanfo Hackman
“If there is any place in the world to start something and be successful, it’s Ghana.”
- Yanfo Hackman
Yanfo Hackman, Image: @emyafrica
Yanfo is the founder of Social Ghana, a social media marketing business based in Accra, Ghana. He always had a talent with words from a young age, and paired with his creativity he eventually decided to go into the world of advertising. In 2013, he set up Social Ghana which now employs 22 full time staff and has a huge portfolio of clients from across the world, including FanMilk, Pepsodent, Moet & Chandon, Hollard Insurance, GB Foods and Land Rover.
Hi Yanfo! I can see from your website that you studied English at university – me too! Why did you decide to study English? Are you a book obsessive too?
I was naturally good at English at school, so like writing essays and comprehension I was really good at. I was always a bit creative and I used to read a lot as well as a child. Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl and people like that. I was inspired to write like them, and I actually used to write short stories when I was growing up. My teachers recognised this in me, and they really encouraged me to pursue the passion.
When it was time to go to university, I didn’t really know what to do, so it just seemed like the most natural choice to continue with English. I kind of wanted to do journalism at one point, but then somewhere in the middle of university I got bored. This was in the beginnings of the smartphone age when the internet was becoming more prominent in our lives. I lost interest in reading and in writing, but I still had that creative spark. I completed my English degree, but I knew that I didn’t want to continue with journalism or anything that I originally thought I did.
What is it that attracted you to marketing and advertising following your degree?
When I was looking for creative industries to go into advertising seemed like the most logical and natural choice. At first, I was a copywriter because I was still pretty good at writing. This was when I was first exposed to brands and the whole idea of marketing; coming up with creative solutions to brand’s problems.
The easy answer of why I stuck with it is that it’s not boring. It’s not like most 9-5’s where you know what you’re doing each day. Every day is different. One day you’re taking pictures of ice cream, and the next you’re doing a documentary for a resort. It’s a very dynamic and unpredictable industry. I’m naturally inquisitive and I have these tendencies to think about what a brand could do better, what would look better on a billboard, what would make people want to buy something. I grew up enjoying adverts as well, I actually used to like the commercial break during football games.
Did you get influenced at all by Mad Men? That’s what always comes to my mind when I think of advertising.
I actually watched Mad Men for the first time about two years ago. I instantly fell in love with it. I am on my second viewing right now! It blew my mind. I don’t usually like shows that are set back in the day, but as soon as I started watching it, I was hooked. Plus, everything that is in there is such an interesting reflection of what actually happens in the advertising world. Obviously, it’s a very different time but the way projects are done, all the internal politics, the back and forth between clients and the agency is all so similar. Seeing how adverts were brought to life without Photoshop, computers etc., was amazing too. The designers were literally artists.
So, where did the idea come from to start Social Ghana?
It all came about when I was in London. In 2011, I was working for Volvo in the marketing team. It was very much traditional marketing, like TV adverts, radio, billboards etc. and when I was there, I introduced the idea of social media as a marketing channel for them. It was the very beginning of social media so it wasn’t really being used by businesses in this way yet. Volvo put me in charge of managing the Facebook page, there wasn’t any Instagram or Twitter or anything, purely Facebook.
After Volvo, I moved to a company called Found based in Farringdon which is a digital agency that manages social media profiles for huge companies such as Wilkinson, Disney, Vodafone and Holiday Inn. All they were doing was managing social media for these businesses. I didn’t even know this was a thing before I found this job. It was fascinating to me that these companies were investing money into another company just to run their social media – it blew my mind a bit and made me start to think about social media marketing as a whole business. I fitted in well at Found and I found that social media strategy came naturally to me. Pretty much as soon as I started working at Found I had decided that this was what I wanted to do in Ghana. While I was there, I was hearing how much these companies were paying for Found’s services – some of the figures were enormous – and it got me thinking that social media must be pretty important for these brands to be investing so much into it. My bosses explained it to me quite well – when a brand pays for a billboard at Oxford Circus station, its because they know a million people a week will see it. If there are 50 million people on Facebook in the UK, they want to be there too!
I started doing some online research of the big businesses in Ghana – insurance companies, car companies, banks – and 95% of what I saw was awful. They didn’t have a social media presence at all and if they did then it was pretty poor. Seeing this solidified the idea in my mind and I knew I had to do something with it. I finished my six-month internship at Found, which I was desperate to finish. At this point, I was starting to get anxious that someone would set up a similar business.
I set up Social Ghana whilst I was still in London. I started emailing a few companies telling them what “we” did (it was just me!), offering our services, pointing out ways where they could improve or explaining how we could improve their website and social media presence. Most companies responded that it wasn’t really something that they were interested in.
But then a floral company, named Unique Floral, replied and said that this was something they had actually had a meeting about last week and they were in desperate need of some help, and could we meet next week? I said yes, of course, even though I was still sat in London. I moved back to Ghana the day before the meeting. I made some notes beforehand and the meeting actually went really well. I felt so nervous, I was only 22/23 at the time and I was speaking to a room full of 40 - 50-year olds about their business and what they should be doing. I calmed down when I realised that I was the only person in the room that knew what they were talking about. 50 year olds don’t know anything about social media!
Did you have a website or anything at this point then?
I actually came up with the name Social Ghana when I was on the plane back to Ghana and it all went from there. All I had was an email account and a word document, no website. Unique Floral ended up being my first client and they actually paid me more than what I was earning back in London, which was crazy considering the exchange rate at the time. To be able to make comfortable money from just one client was extremely inspiring, I realised if I could get another two or three clients like that then I could be really successful. I worked out of my bedroom for months. I was doing everything, and I loved it – it really didn’t feel like work at this point.
The Social Ghana team, Image: @bridgeitproductions
When did you start employing people? It looks like you have a pretty big team now!
So, I started doing walk-ins to other businesses and I now had Unique Floral as an example of what Social Ghana could do. We (but it was still just me at this point) had taken them from a few hundred likes on their posts to around 20,000 likes with thousands of comments too. This was really important information to secure our next clients, which happened to be Latex Foam (which is like the IKEA of Ghana), Azar Paint, Ashfoam and a nightclub in Accra called Firefly. At the end of my first year I had five or six really strong clients.
My dad then came to me and said he thought I should start working for the ad agency, Publicis. He knew somebody there and he wanted me to work in their Ghana office to get some experience with the advertising industry in Ghana. I was so upset – why did I need a job when I was running a business? I said no, I felt like I knew what I was doing; I had clients, I was making good money and I wanted to focus on Social Ghana. He was insistent that it would help me in the long run. Eventually, we made a deal; we agreed that I would try it out for three months and then I would go back to Social Ghana. I ended up staying there for two years and it was probably the best decision that I could have made – or, that my dad could have made for me.
It made me realise that everything that I was doing was so low level and so low quality compared to big advertising agencies. For example, I was still using Microsoft Word to put my reports together. It completely changed the way I approached Social Ghana afterwards and it also introduced me to so many people in the industry – writers, videographers, designers, etc. After the three months my dad asked me if I was leaving to go back to Social Ghana and I said no, I need more of this!
My boss at Publicis knew about Social Ghana and she was really flexible with letting me go to client meetings and making up the time later if I needed to. But it started to get busier at Publicis and I was struggling to balance the two. I asked my sister, Nana Aba, if she could help me out by going to some client meetings and stuff. I gave her some training and then she essentially became my person on the ground for the times when I wasn’t able to go out and meet clients. It was meant to be a temporary thing until she found a new job, but she ended up staying long-term. I call her one of the founding members now; she’s my senior account manager. Having her on board allowed me to stop spending so much time thinking about clients so I could focus just on the social media aspect and managing the pages. This also allowed me the time to look for new clients.
I then realised if I got another account manager then I could have even more time to do other things and I could take some pressure off Nana Aba – as well as hopefully get more clients. From there I hired my cousin Kat and Sam, a friend that I went to school with, and so we had a four-person team for quite a while. After this, I hired a graphic designer and then it all fell into place from there till eventually we had multiple graphic designers and copywriters.
Breast Cancer Awareness campaign for Fan Ice Ghana, Image: @socialghana
Tell me about one of your most exciting projects or clients that you’ve worked for?
One of our biggest clients is FanMilk, which is an ice cream and other frozen treats producer and we work on both their Ghana and Nigeria-based brands. They are probably the most known brand in Ghana. Everybody grew up on their ice cream. To win this contract we were up against some of the biggest agencies in the world, there were agencies pitching from the UK, South Africa and Egypt.
It was a very old legacy brand, and we decided to add more colour and fun to give it more life and make it appealing to the newer generation, and they loved it! Everyone was talking about the “new” Fan Milk, even newspapers were writing articles about it, TV stations were covering it. It was a big deal. It was the one client and the one piece of work that got everybody else to know who we were and what we did. Afterwards, we had companies calling us asking us to do their social media, whereas before it was always us calling them.
Do you get many people asking you for advice, considering where your business is at? What do you tell them?
What I always say is that, if there is any place in the world to start something and be successful, it’s Ghana. There are very few failure stories out of starting businesses in Ghana. There is a market for anything whether that’s in farming, technology, finance, entertainment, art, it could be literally anything. There are people that will be willing to buy what you’re offering.
My advice is just to go for it and see what happens. If it fails, it’s not the end of the world.
Finally, let’s move away from Social Ghana a tad, to just Ghana. What is your favourite thing about living in Ghana?
Firstly, all my friends and family are here. Everything I know is from here or is inspired by here. It is a very nice place to live. I think we are actually one of the top destinations on the continent for our way of life.
It’s changing and evolving year by year though, there is always something new happening. A lot of people move here, and Accra is definitely becoming more cosmopolitan. It’s similar to London in that sense, there is always something to do and people to meet. It’s also a very young country, the average age in Ghana is 21 I believe, so there’s so much energy here.
There are lots of entrepreneurs too, lots of people want to start their own business, their own restaurant or online shop etc. Being surrounded by like-minded people who are trying to make things happen, it’s contagious, and it makes you feel good.
Thank you so much for talking to me, Yanfo. I can’t wait to see what else Social Ghana does in the future.
You can find out more about Social Ghana on their website and Instagram. Click here for more interviews from our Ghana Culture Series.
Interview by Mollie Cohen
