Eskimi Hits 7 Million Users And Becomes Largest Social Network To Meet New People In Africa

Mobile community Eskimi celebrated 7 million customer mark. Same time number of customers from the biggest Eskimi market Nigeria reached 3.5 million. Eskimi also reached 1 billion monthly ad impressions.

“These are exciting times in Eskimi, as we are growing faster every day – we have grown more than 1 million new customers last month. We are happy to deliver services that are loved and recommended by people to their friends.” Those were the words of  Vytas Paukstys, CEO of Eskimi in reaction to recent growth figures. More than 80% of Eskimi customer base had grown organically.

Eskimi took the path to grow focusing to feature phone audience while most of the products are now built for new iOS and Android platforms. The company has proven that it understands that most of the mobile browsing audience is still on the simple devices and this will stay for the few years. There are a lot of people coming to the market and start using mobile internet – they use the old phones. Eskimi research shows that more than 95% of the customers still use feature phones.

Eskimi was launched as a simple mobile web chat service and repositioned the product and functions to social network to meet new people. Eskimi is now the largest mobile social network to meet new people in Africa. Eskimi largest markets are Nigeria, Ghana, Vietnam, Indonesia. Eskimi users browse profiles, chat, share photos, discuss in forums, share their interests.

The core metric tracked by Eskimi and that shows user engagement is time spend online every day – average user spends around one hour in the product.

On the business side, Eskimi started offering unique marketing tools for advertisers in Africa and Nigeria in first quarter of 2012. Eskimi is changing how mobile marketing is used and has special  tools for FMCG sector, sales promotional, branding campaigns. Eskimi is very focused on the end result of our business customers, so we do not just sell clicks or impressions. We deliver the final result – be it new customer registrations, full branding campaigns, increased sales of goods or services or just massive traffic to new sites.

Supporting the “The Cashless Nigeria Project”, Eskimi has successfully developed and tested customer acquisition tools for mobile money operators, where financial institutions can achieve up to 30% of conversion rates to increase their mobile money customers.

Eskimi also introduced special co-branded community services to mobile operators, where due to unique offering mobile operators can grow data revenue, top-up revenue, VAS revenue and use Eskimi for their loyalty and customer acquisition activities.

Eskimi is developed by a team based in Vilnius, Lithuania and is now recruiting sales teams in Nigeria, Ghana and other main markets.