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Facebook's experts engaged with various Nigerian technology startups and developers at the Social Media Week Lagos, the week-long conference that held in February, where the social networking giant hosted different events to support tech innovators and small businesses.  

According to a statement released on Tuesday, Facebook said the events culminated in a Developer Day and Codelab, where Facebook’s experts worked with top Nigerian developers on growth hacking, a marketing technique that enables startups to use analytical skills and social metrics to sell products and gain exposure.

Facebook also introduced developers to the social media company's FbStart programme, a platform designed to help mobile startups to build and grow their apps.

Social Media Week Lagos is a week-long event that provides ideas, trends and insights to enable businesses to grow and engage a wider audience in a hyper-connected world. The events hosted by Facebook included workshops, masterclasses, which provided networking opportunities for tech innovators to take advantage of Facebook’s Free Basics, FBStart and other Facebook solutions to be innovative and reach a wider audience.  

Facebook recently announced that the social networking site has 16 million active users in Nigeria, with 7.2 million people in Nigeria visiting Facebook each day.

“With 16 million people in Nigeria visiting Facebook each month, we are constantly looking for ways to deepen our partnerships in the country. Social Media Week in Lagos was a perfect opportunity for us to spend time with the Nigerian developer and content community to share expertise and get feedback to shape our strategy going forward,” Emeka Afigbo, Product Partnerhsips Manager at Facebook, said.

Also last month, Facebook hosted a roundtable with small and medium-sized enterprises from Ghana and Nigeria in Accra. The focus was on how Facebook can help small businesses reach the right customers at less cost and get high returns.

Facebook’s Free Basics, a programme that brings relevant basic internet services without data charges to people in developing countries, has added a number of new partners to its ecosystem, including the SmartBusiness website (http://Change-Corp.com/apps/smartbusiness) that helps people get information needed to launch and run businesses using any web-enabled phone or computer.